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reasoningdaily · 3 months

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“We’re Going to Be Overwhelmed”: How Louisiana Just Ballooned Its Jail Population

Louisiana's governor championed a raft of new laws that double down on punishment, fueling a cycle of incarceration that sends more money into local sheriffs' coffers.

Piper French | March 8, 2024

In February, as the Louisiana legislature debated Senate Bill 3, which would move all 17 year olds charged with a crime out of the juvenile justice system and back into the adult system, Will Harrell, an advisor to New Orleans Sheriff Susan Hutson, went to update the department’s Prison Rape Elimination Act coordinator on the proposed changes. He watched as tears came to her eyes. Teenagers are uniquely vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse in adult jails, and federal law requires they be separated from the adult population, which often translates to solitary confinement conditions. “She knows what that means for these kids,” Harrell told Bolts.

The bill quickly passed and was signed into law by Louisiana’s new governor Jeff Landry on Wednesday. Now, Harrell is scrambling to figure out how to absorb dozens of 17 year olds into the already-overburdened Orleans Parish Justice Center once SB 3 takes effect in April. “We’re already at capacity. We’re under a consent decree,” he said. “I talked to deputies who were there seven years ago when they had kids. And they were like, ‘oh, this is just going to be a mess.’”

“In conjunction with other legislation pending during this special session, we anticipate a massive, unmanageable population explosion at OJC,” Hutson wrote in a statement.

Landry sailed into the governor’s office last November after a campaign filled with crime-and-punishment rhetoric. Despite the fact that Louisiana already has the nation’s highest rate of incarceration, he made one of his first acts as governor convening a special legislative session on crime. In an extraordinarily fast nine-day session which ended last Friday, Republican lawmakers passed all 37 bills under consideration, a grab bag of tough-on-crime proposals that included restricting post-conviction relief, increasing law enforcement immunity, and legalizing execution methods such as nitrogen gas and the electric chair.

Sarah Omojola, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office, called it a “one hundred percent” rollback of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, the raft of bipartisan criminal legal reforms passed under former Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards in 2017. “In some instances, this isn’t just a rollback,” she added. “This is taking us back to the early 2000s, late ‘90s.”

Observers are just starting to take stock of what this flurry of new legislation will mean for crime deterrence, and for the state budget. But Omojola, Harrell, and others are already certain that several different measures will work together to significantly grow the state’s pretrial populations, as well as the number of people sentenced and serving time. Other bills effectively eliminate parole, vastly restrict “good time” credits, and mandate prison time for technical violations of parole and probation.

“Of course it’s going to balloon the prison population. Every single time these kinds of laws go into play, the incarceration rate jumps,” said Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, a University of Kentucky geography professor whose 2023 book, Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, examines incarceration in the state. “That’s just basic math.”

And in Louisiana, that means, once again, a profound and reverberating impact on parish jails and sheriffs. Owing to a unique arrangement designed to address overcrowding and bad conditions at Angola prison back in the 1970s, Louisiana’s local lock-ups house more than half of its state prisoner population.

Jails operate as sort of a carceral shadow system: deadlier than the state prison system, lacking many of its resources and offerings, and run by sheriffs, who are comparatively unaccountable to state officials. East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a dangerous jail that has for 15 years running been presided over by the same notorious sheriff, for instance, does not allow in-person visits, even though some of the people held there have been incarcerated for years on end. If someone dies in custody in a Louisiana jail, officials have no responsibility to notify their loved ones.

The Louisiana Sheriff’s Association, which lobbies on behalf of the state’s 64 sheriffs, testified in favor of SB 3, despite Hutson’s opposition. “It’s not just a bill that we are supporting, this is a bill that is part of our plan,” spokesperson Mike Ranatza told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This is what we asked the governor to entertain for us in the special crime session…this is what the overwhelming majority of our sheriffs have asked for.”

The jail system runs on “per diem” payments that the state grants local law enforcement in exchange for jailing people who have been sentenced to state prison, payments which this year will total $177 million. More prisoners means more money for sheriffs across the state—and likely future efforts to expand jails, according to Pelot-Hobbs.

“Louisiana law enforcement agencies are uniquely invested in incarceration” because of the per-diem system, Omojola told Bolts. “They financially benefit from people who are being held in their jails without providing any of those programs or resources.”

The origins of today’s jail arrangement has its roots not in tough-on-crime policies, but in a lawsuit filed by four Black Angola prisoners challenging the conditions of their confinement. In 1975, in response to the lawsuit, a federal judge limited Angola’s population. Rather than build new prisons, it was cheaper and easier for the state to transfer some prisoners to local jails to serve the remainder of their sentences. At first, Pelot-Hobbs writes in Prison Capital, sheriffs protested. But after the per diem system was instituted, they began to consider their new prisoners a boon, even asking Angola to send them more people.

By the 1990s, Pelot-Hobbs argues, jails had gone from being a “temporary spatial fix” to “the long-term geographic solution for the Louisiana carceral state.” Sheriffs, now reliant on the per-diem money, organized for jail expansion to hold more state prisoners. Between 1999 and 2019, the state added some 14,000 jail beds. “Other parishes built out huge jails that they’ll never need for their local population,” said Harrell. “It’s like a hotel. You open up the hotel, DOC sends you some kid from New Orleans, they pay you for the hotel rooms. And that literally is why you have the jail.”

This system may financially benefit local sheriffs and the state department of corrections, but it comes at the expense of the people locked up in their jails. “There’s nothing on the inside,” said Amelia Herrera, an organizer with Voice of the Experienced’s Baton Rouge chapter who spent time in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in 2015 and has a loved one currently incarcerated there. Officials, she said, “will say the reason there’s no type of programs inside of this facility is because it’s a pre-trial facility…But when we have people in there for six and seven years?”

“You can’t visit,” she added. “They make it almost impossible to keep a connection with the outside.”

As it stands, providing no programming or visits even for people locked up for years on end is legal. Louisiana’s regulations governing how people should be treated while incarcerated in its jails are notably minimal and vague. While the state has a set of “basic jail guidelines” that apply to facilities that house state prisoners, a 2023 report by the University of Texas at Austin’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab found that they fell short compared to regional counterparts like Texas and Florida. The report determined that the state’s jails have little to no requirements regarding transparency around in-custody deaths, adequate heating and cooling systems, or in-person visiting rights, and that their regulations around discipline are the least comprehensive of anything they reviewed. It also noted that the family members of incarcerated Louisianans contend that the regulations that do exist are routinely flouted.

The state legislature had commissioned the report, which concluded with a set of recommendations for jails to adopt guidelines prohibiting corporal punishment and the denial of basic needs like water or sleep. But when the lab’s director, Michele Deitch, and her team submitted their work last fall, the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association immediately sent a letter expressing appreciation for the work but signaling they would not follow the bulk of their recommendations, citing concerns over security plus limited capacity.

The report was completed several months before Landry took office. Now the new raft of bills passed during the special crime session threatens to turbocharge Louisiana’s cycle of jail expansion, exacerbating the problems already on display in the report’s pages before the state does much to try to remedy them.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry speaking at CPAC conference in Texas in August 2022. (Lev Radin/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Omojola highlighted three bills proposed by Republican Senator Debbie Villio, HB 9, 10, and 11, which, taken together, “essentially work to make sentences much much longer—and therefore fill our prisons and our jails,” she said. HB 9 aims to abolish discretionary parole in most cases, HB 10 limits the accumulation of “good time” credits meaning that an individual would be required to serve at least 85 percent of his sentence without exception, and HB 11 increases the penalties for even technical violations of parole or probation.

Harrell noted that HB 9 and 10 may have an indirect impact on the pretrial population as well, because they take away people’s incentive to accept a plea offer. With vastly reduced prospects of getting out on parole or getting a sentence reduced with “good time” credits, people may be less keen to accept a conviction and start getting their time over with, and more likely to wait out a trial date in jail. “When that’s taken away from them, they are like, ‘Well, then why should I leave? I’m just gonna stay here in jail and roll my dice and hopefully somebody on a jury will decide that I’m not guilty,’” he said.

Villio, the bills’ sponsor and an ally of Landry’s, contends that these laws won’t increase prison populations as long as judges adjust their sentencing decisions accordingly. In a text message to Nola.com, she said, “It requires a mind-reset on sentencing that in the end should result in a wash. We, of course, will be monitoring that.” When Bolts asked how this sort of paradigm shift for judges would work in practice, Villio said, “I have the utmost confidence in our judiciary,” noting she believes that trainings have already been scheduled.

The Crime and Justice Institute, a policy analysis group, has studied other states’ implementation of similar determinate sentencing laws; Leonard Engel, the group’s director of policy and campaigns, told Bolts their research shows that judges do not ultimately adjust their sentences anywhere enough to make up the difference in years served.

HB 11, the bill dealing with technical violations of probation and parole, is also alarming to reform advocates like Bruce Reilly of Voice of the Experienced. Under the terms of the bill, people on parole or probation who are merely re-arrested, not even convicted, could get sent to prison. “That’s really where the sheriff and jails are gonna get their bread and butter,” Reilly said.

The special session also passed a law requiring 20 year mandatory minimums for carjacking cases that involve bodily injury and established financing to establish a state trooper force for New Orleans. “That’s gonna rack up a whole bunch of new arrests,” Harell said of the state trooper force. “Where do you think those people are gonna be housed?”

Overcrowding is likely to lead to an expansion of the footprint of local jails in what Pelot-Hobbs predicted could be a repeat of the same patterns of the 1980s and 1990s. The Crime and Justice Institute estimates that the additional prison time people in a given year serve under HB 9 and 10, instead of getting out on “good time” credits or parole, will cost the state upwards of a billion dollars over time. And that’s before any budget increases sheriffs could ask for—and they are likely to ask, Pelot-Hobbs said. “We’re going to see sheriffs organizing and pushing to expand their jails for this moment,” she said. “We are going to see sheriffs mobilizing and organizing to get either property taxes or millages or sales taxes to get more jail space to incarcerate the state prisoners. I also think we’re likely going to see them lobbying the state legislature for higher per diem rates.”

Advocates worry that the growth of local budgets and contracts, combined with Landry’s efforts to reduce accountability for law enforcement, will add to the state’s problems with cronyism. “It’s going to fuel the corruption, the closed circle of sheriffs and the folks who contract with them, who will know that there’s more money to be had if they can land the contracts for this jail expansion and for the increased services needed for a larger population,” says Julien Burns, the communications lead for Sheriffs for Trusting Communities. Along with Common Cause, the group has documented how sheriffs receive millions in campaign contributions from guard uniform makers, telecoms and bail bonds companies, and contractors that may hope to secure lucrative contracts with the department.

In the waning days of the special crime session, a discussion finally arose about the collective impact of these bills on Louisiana’s jails, with even conservative lawmakers such as Villio, the sponsor of HB 9, 10, and 11, expressing an awareness of the need for greater programming and services in the jails. “Everybody’s on record, saying the right thing—like if we’re gonna do this, we can’t just warehouse [people]. We’re gonna have to address the issues,” said Harrell. The legislature now moves to its regular session, where some of these issues could be hammered out.

Dramatically expanding jail programming, of course, would mean an even greater expansion of the carceral budget in Louisiana. Pelot-Hobbs said that she doubts that substantive programming will actually materialize in the jails. “I just think it’s a false promise,” she told Bolts. “And even if the promise came true, it’s still just acquiescing to the general kind of commitment to incarceration as the solution.”

Still, in Harrell’s view, allocating such resources is crucial given the vastly restricted terrain for criminal legal transformation in the state as long as Landry is in office. “These tough on crime Republicans are running the show,” he said. “There’s no going back right now, at least for the next four years. And so to the extent people are concerned about the health and safety of people who are currently incarcerated, who will soon be incarcerated under these legislations, they need to understand that programming resources matter.”

Nola.com reported this week that the exact costs of the laws that have already passed in February are uncertain because lawmakers rushed them through, suspending usual rules that would have entailed more attention to the budget.

The state’s decision to double down on incarceration, Pelot-Hobbs added, will affect public spending in other areas, too. “As money gets more and more directed towards these kinds of expenditure projects, less funds are going to be available for road construction, levy construction, schools,” she said. “The criminal legal system never operates in a silo.”

#Louisiana #Criminal justice

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nansheonearth · 2 years

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/25/hawaii-zero-girls-youth-correctional-facility/

Hawaii has no girls in juvenile detention. Here’s how it got there.

Nationwide, there have been efforts to lower youth incarceration rates and close youth prisons

By Claire Healy

July 25, 2022 at 2:57 p.m. EDT

This story has been updated.

When Mark Patterson took over as administrator of the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility in 2014, he inherited 500 acres of farm ranch — and the care of 26 boys and seven girls between 13 and 19 years old.

By 2016, his facility, in Kailua, Oahu, was only holding between five and six girls at a time. And in June, the last girl left the facility.

For the first time, there are no girls incarcerated in the state of Hawaii.

Patterson said this moment is “20 years in the making,” and the result of a systemwide effort to divert girls from the judicial system and into trauma-based care programs. The number of incarcerated boys has also lowered significantly in the past decade, he added.

Patterson said HYCF is a last resort — the kids there “have run away from programs 10 to 11 times” and are the most vulnerable of the high-risk youth. But various state officials have agreed that “we no longer want to keep sending our kids to prison,” Patterson said.

“What I’m trying to do is end the punitive model that we have so long used for our kids, and we replace it with a therapeutic model,” he added. “Do we really have to put a child in prison because she ran away? What kind of other environment is more conducive for her to heal and be successful in the community?”

Hawaii isn’t the only state to reach zero girls in long-term placement facilities.

According to Lindsay Rosenthal, director of the Vera Institute’s Initiative to End Girls’ Incarceration, Vermont has zero long-term placement facilities for girls, and for nine months in 2020, Maine had zero incarcerated girls statewide. Since February 2021, New York City hasn’t had more than two girls in the state’s juvenile placement facility at any given time.

After 35 years, a lawsuit over ‘inhumane’ juvenile detention in D.C. has led to major reforms

This is part of a larger trend in juvenile justice reform: Since 2000, more than 1,000 juvenile facilities have closed, including two-thirds of the largest facilities. And between 2000 and 2018, youth incarceration rates dropped by more than half, according to the Square One Project, a justice reform initiative.

But just as women are the fastest-growing prison population, the proportion of girls in juvenile detention has increased even as overall numbers have gone down. Researchers also estimate a disproportionate number of incarcerated youth are nonbinary or transgender, although there is limited data on this. As advocates point out, the majority of incarcerated girls are in prison for low-level offenses, often influenced by a history of abuse — as noted in various research — or systemic challenges, such as poverty.

Rosenthal said juvenile justice reform has progressed dramatically in the past 10 to 15 years. But she emphasized that a state reaching zero doesn’t necessarily reflect progress — Vermont has sent some girls to facilities in New Hampshire, and placed at least one girl into an adult prison, for example — without the presence of community-based alternative programming. HYCF is an example of a facility that has seen such an investment pay off, she said.

Gender-focused programming is essential, Rosethal added, because of “the criminalization of sexual abuse.” This legacy, she said, reaches back to colonization and slavery in the United States and has resulted in the disproportionately high incarceration rates of Black and Indigenous women and girls.

“No matter what girls are charged with in the juvenile legal system today, the most common reason why they’re incarcerated, which most leaders openly talk about, is that they are not safe in the community,” she said. “That’s wrong, and it has incredibly deep historical roots.”

The history of HYCF has also been thrown into the spotlight this year: In May, the Interior Department released an investigative report that found thousands or tens of thousands of children died in the custody of federal boarding schools, which operated between 1819 and 1969 and separated Native American and Native Hawaiian children from their families. Among their list of schools implicated in Hawaii are the Kawailoa and Waialee Industrial and Reformatory Schools, HYCF’s direct predecessors that merged into the facility in 1961.

The facility also received attention in the early aughts, when a 2004 Justice Department investigation found that the facility was in a “state of chaos” with rampant abuse. The American Civil Liberties Union won a lawsuit against HYCF in 2006, in which three young people charged the facility and its staff with homophobic and transphobic abuse.

Investigation finds burial sites at 53 federal Indian boarding schools

Patterson said the movement to replace punitive systems with trauma-informed care in Hawaii’s juvenile justice system reaches back to 2004, when Judge Karen Radius, a now-retired First Circuit Family Court judge, founded Girls Court. One of the first in the nation, the program aimed to address the specific crimes and trauma history of girls.

“News that there are currently no girls in the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility at this point in time is great news. But we know it doesn’t mean we have solved all the issues facing girls and young women,” Radius said, noting her concern that pandemic shutdowns and policy changes may have barred at-risk youth from receiving necessary support.

Many influential programs in the state followed the formation of Girls Court. In 2009, Project Kealahou launched as a six-year, federally funded program aimed at improving services for Hawaii’s at-risk female youth. And in 2013, Hawaii created the Juvenile Justice Reform Task Force to analyze the juvenile justice system in Hawaii and provide policy recommendations aimed at reducing the HYCF population.

Then, in 2018, Patterson partnered with the Initiative to End Girls’ Incarceration and drafted a “10-year strategy to get to zero.” The overarching goal was to focus on the underlying trauma the youth were suffering from, instead of the crimes they were charged with, Patterson said.

Before working with youths, Patterson was the warden of Hawaii’s only women’s prison, the Women’s Community Correctional Center (WCCC), across the street. He said his time there showed him how many of the women there could trace their trauma back to their home life as a child.

That same year, he set out transitioning HYCF into the Kawailoa Youth and Family Wellness Center, remodeling the program around trauma-informed care — a framework for care providers to understand and consider the impact an individual’s trauma history has on their life and health. Today’s campus has a homeless shelter, an assessment center, a vocational program serving youths ages 15 to 24, a farm managed by a nonprofit and a high school for high-risk youths.

Guiding this transformation was Patterson’s goal of creating a pu’uhonua — a place created within a traditional Hawaiian village for conflict resolution and forgiveness — for Hawaii’s most vulnerable youths.

As Patterson described it, a pu’uhonua acknowledges and identifies a wrong that has been committed in the village. But unlike a punitive system, “we’re going to teach you how to live with the village and manage the wrong,” he said. “So that you’re no longer an outcast, but you’re still welcome back.”

Throughout decades of criminal justice reform in Hawaii, advocates have drawn attention to the disproportionate incarceration of Native Hawaiians. A study by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs in 2009 reported that Native Hawaiians were more likely to get a prison sentence than any other ethnic group in Hawaii, and that their prison sentences were likely to be longer.

Patterson said that in his experience, a disproportionate amount of teenagers coming to him are Native Hawaiians — both the girls and boys at his facility.

The OHA attributes the overrepresentation of Native Hawaiians in the criminal justice system to disparate treatment. Its 2009 report described discrimination within the courts, parole practices and during interactions with correctional staff. It also detailed culturally inappropriate reentry services for Native Hawaiians.

For Toni Bissen, executive director of the Pu’a Foundation, an organization focused on healing and reconciliation efforts related to the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, it all comes back to trauma: personal, historical and intergenerational.

“The generational aspect of loss and power, poverty, violence that just kind of compounds,” she said. “That is what is happening in these households. And that’s why drugs, truancy and different kinds of things are outlets.”

The Pu’a Foundation ran a pre-transition class for the last four girls incarcerated at HYCF. But another important task in the transition was identifying programs that could provide them with specialty care. For some previously incarcerated girls, Pearl Haven was that place.

Created two years ago by the nonprofit Ho’ola Na Pua (HNP), Pearl Haven is the first live-in care center on Hawaii for survivors of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. Jessica Munoz, president of HNP, said she saw a need for Pearl Haven when she was working as a clinical nurse practitioner in Hawaii.

“When I first started, we were arresting kids,” she said. “We weren’t screening for sexual exploitation or trafficking among the court system, among the child welfare system.”

Tammy Bitanga, a lived experience expert and outreach coordinator at HNP, sees the release of the girls at HYCF as a positive step forward. As a survivor of sex trafficking, she said she has also seen firsthand how the Hawaii juvenile justice system is changing.

She was trafficked in the 1970s, she said, when “there was no word called trafficking.” Instead, she was seen as an underage prostitute. “I hid behind that,” she said. “So I never told anybody what I was doing while I was on the run for nine months from the system.”

Now, the system is providing young women with the chance to look at “what was done to them, instead of what they’ve done,” Bitanga said.

Cathy Betts, director of the Department of Human Services in Hawaii, said reaching zero gave her “hope for the future” — and that trauma-informed care is necessary for “any work involving humans.”

For her, this is also a bittersweet moment: a reflection of many Hawaiians working to improve the lives of at-risk girls, which she saw firsthand while leading the Hawaii Commission on the Status of Women.

“You’ve got to understand that people’s blood, sweat and tears went into this moment,” she said, tearing up. “We’ve got judges that retired that weren’t able to see this moment, that passed, that spent their whole lives as attorneys and litigators and people who serve children and families who weren’t able to see that moment. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

Patterson is now turning his attention to helping expand legislation on trauma-informed care. In 2021, state lawmakers passed a bill establishing a trauma-informed care task force within the Department of Health, which Betts is a part of. And on July 12, lawmakers passed a bill establishing a temporary office of wellness and resilience in the office of the governor, which is authorized to address issues and implement solutions identified by the task force.

Despite this progress, Patterson said, the job is far from over.

“This is not a zero … everybody’s finished, we can go home,” he said. “Now the question is sustaining zero.”

#prison #education #radfem #sisterhood #hawaii #good vibes #o

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naturalrights-retard · 4 months

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By Hannah Zhao, José Martinez, and Will Greenberg

Incarceration rates in the United States have long been among the highest in the world, and in response to the systemic flaws and biases unveiled by the renewed scrutiny of the criminal legal system, many advocates have championed new policies aimed at reducing sentences and improving conditions in prisons. Some have touted the use of electronic monitoring (EM) as an alternative fix to ensure that people whose cases have yet to be adjudicated are not physically detained. Unsurprisingly, those most often making these claims are the for-profit firms offering EM technology and the governmental agencies they contract with, and there is little data to back them up. In a new report, the Vera Institute of Justice provides the most detailed data yet showing that these claims don’t match reality, and outlines a number of issues with how EM is administered across the country.

Another Private Sector Wild West

According to interviews and an analysis of policies across hundreds of jurisdictions, the Vera Institute found that the use of EM was an unregulated patchwork across counties, states, and the federal government. As private firms market new products, the level of testing and quality assurance has failed to keep up with the drive to get contracts with local and state law enforcement agencies. Relying on technology produced by such a disordered industry can lead to reincarceration due to faulty equipment, significantly increased surveillance on those being monitored and their household, and onerous requirements for people under EM than when dealing with probation or parole officers.

Even the question of jurisdictional authority is a mess. The Vera Institute explains that agencies frequently rely on private firms that further subcontract out the hardware or software, and individuals in rural areas can create profitable businesses for themselves that only serve as a middleman between the criminal justice system and the hardware and software vendors. The Vera Institute suggests that this can lead to corruption, including the extortion by these small subcontractors of people held on EM, often with no oversight or public sector transparency. That presents a problem to the data collection, public records requests, and other investigative work that policymakers, advocates, and journalists rely on to find the truth and inform policy.

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cyarskaren52 · 1 year

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RACISM IN LAW ENFORCEMENT

How The Sluggish Arrest of Daniel Penny Exposes His White Privilege

Black suspects are not treated with nearly as much grace

Allison Wiltz

5 min read·9 hours ago

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When police officers arrive, they expect an immediate response from everyone on the scene, and failing to comply with any demand can lead to a deadly standoff. Of course, in a more humane system, officers would understand that some people cannot immediately comply because of physical and psychological differences, but we're not there yet. Instead, what we have is a system where impatience, cruelty, and racism reign supreme. Black people are 2.9 timesmore likely to be killed by a police officer than White people. "In America, Black people must" often "fight those natural human urges," like fight-or-flight if they hope to survive the next traffic stop. So, what does it say about our society that a White man like Daniel Penny can "turn himself in to authorities" at his leisure after a video suggests he killed Jordan Neely, a Black man, when Black people are routinely killed during traffic stops for alleged noncompliance? It suggests that white privilege is the bedrock of our criminal justice system and that there is a consistent difference in the way our society treats Black and White suspects.

According to a report written by the Vera Institute of Justice, racial discrimination within America's criminal justice system has been cemented into its foundation, that it "unjustifiably targeted Black people since the Reconstruction Era, including Black codes, vagrancy laws, and convict leasing, all of which were used to continue post-slavery control over newly-freed people." Now, even "race-neutral" laws continue to perpetuate the same anti-Black racism, which disproportionately punishes Black people. In short, it is not a coincidence that a White man suspected of killing a Black man is given more grace than Black suspects — the system is functioning as designed.

Making arrangements before your arrest is the epitome of white privilege.

In our nation, the presumption of innocence protects those accused of committing a crime of unfair treatment until their case can be adjudicated in a court of law. However, the truth is that Black people are often treated as if they are guilty before their arrest. For instance, a White Louisiana police officer Alexander Tyler was arrested after "fatally shooting" Alonzo Bagley, a 43-year old "an unarmed Black man," believed to be a fleeing police officer "responding to a domestic disturbance," last February. Of course, Bagley never got to make it into court to face any criminal charges — he was killed on the scene. Under this societal context, being able to schedule a time to turn yourself into law enforcement is the epitome of white privilege because it is something Black people are typically deprived of. Not only are Black suspects rarely allowed to schedule a time to turn themselves in to authorities, but they can be killed on the scene if the officer believes they are not compliant or submissive enough to satisfy their ego. And Black suspects don’t have to be suspected of murder to be treated with deadly force — any suspected infraction can lead to their fatality.

In the Columbus Dispatch, Susan K. Smith wrote, "They are trained to regard Black and brown people as "the enemy" and in training, a so-called "warrior mindset" is cultivated. But, of course, the flip side of the coin is that many White police officers treat White people like their allies or friend, even when suspected of committing a violent crime. We saw this in the way police officers' provided water and gratitude to 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a young White man who brought his gun to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the aftermath of a police shooting that left a Black man, Jacob Blake, paralyzed. Later that evening, Rittenhouse shot three unarmed Black Lives Matter protestors, leaving two dead. In short, officers did not see Rittenhouse as a threat — his whiteness shielded him from any discernment that could have kept the community safe that night. Racism blinded officers so that they thought unarmed Black Lives Matter Protesters were dangerous instead of the White men bringing guns into Kenosha.

The sluggish arrest of Daniel Penny exposes his white privilege and lays it plain like laundry on the clothesline. As Jon Blisteinwrote in Rolling Stone, "It took prosecutors eleven days to charge Penny, who killed Neely after putting him in a fatal chokehold." To be suspected of committing such a violent, heinous crime and still be given the time to collect yourself is something other White suspects can relate to. For instance, after self-proclaimed white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine Black churchgoers in a Charleston church, police officers were caught allowing him to purchase Burger King. It's as if they were congratulating him for a job well done, as if killing innocent Black people was something to feel proud of or rewarding him in the only way they could, by showing grace despite the callousness of his crimes.

Black people like George Floyd, Daunte Wright, and Breonna Taylor were not given an opportunity to turn themselves in for questioning, make arrangements, eat a meal of their choosing, connect with their families, or seek counsel — they were killed on the spot. So, what we're faced with is a system that punishes Black people for not complying fast enough but also gives White people all the time they need to yield to their demands, a disparity that comprises the integrity of the system. Racism is the leak in America's faulty roof, and every time a storm comes, we're constantly reaching for yet another bucket for the inevitable downpour, the inequitable mess our negligence continues to produce. The criminal justice system in America is unjust because from the moment a person is suspected of a crime, the race of the suspect will help determine their fate.

The fact that our system punishes Black people for not complying fast enough but gives White people all the time they need to comply with law enforcement demands crumbles the credibility of those claiming that Black people can comply-themselves-out-of-racism, who routinely blame Black people for their disproportionate deaths at the hands of law enforcement. If anything, the sluggish arrest of Daniel Perry after his suspected involvement in Neely's death shows how white privilege operates so that a White suspected murderer is given more grace than a Black person suspected of running a stop sign.

Racial prejudicial policing contributes to a phenomenon where Black people are regularly "deprived of" their "fight or flight response" and are expected to submit under the penalty of death. Yet, when we question the system, we're often asked to understand that this is how law enforcement operates. But when we examine the treatment of White defendants, we see that the system operates differently, depending on your skin color, that when you’re White, you can get some time to go home, contact a lawyer, sleep in your own bed, and relax before turning yourself into the authorities. If our system weren’t racist, the same grace would be extended to Black suspects, but we know that’s not how America’s dog and pony show operates.

How Racial Stereotypes Dehumanize Black Victims Like Jordan Neely

Calling non-violent homicide victims "aggressive" is racist

momentum.medium.com

How Black People Are Deprived of Fight or Flight Response

When it comes to confrontations with the police, Black people are asked to do something strange

momentum.medium.com

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female-malice · 2 years

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According to the November 17 Vera Institute article, Trimble is now working with the Black and Pink project — an advocacy organization focused on prison abolitionism. Black and Pink is currently partnered with the Vera Institute to produce the report on trans-identified people and the criminal justice system.

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There is so much wrong with this. I recommend reading the full article which details Trimble's crimes and his status as a trans activist.

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masterofd1saster · 1 year

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CJ current events - May 2023

Amid a rise in anti-semitic hate crime, some Jewish women - including Orthodox, are learning self defense and packing heat. Good essay by Adam Popescu.

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You think someone else is misogynist?

A New York Democrat blamed "institutional misogyny" as she resigned from her government leadership position in the wake of accusations a staffer tried to solicit someone he thought was an underaged girl.

Westchester County Board of Legislators Chair Catherine Borgia stepped down on Friday under pressure from colleagues who said she failed to act when she was told in December that the staffer was caught on video by a vigilante group that tricked him into thinking he was meeting a 14-year-old. ***

Former legislative aide Anand Singh, 33, was fired on April 13 after video published by vigilante group OBL Global showed him allegedly trying to meet up with someone he thought was an underaged girl in New Jersey.

The 31-minute video shows a man, reportedly Singh, messaging with someone he thought was a 14-year-old female, but was actually an OBL Global "decoy." The messages become more sexual in nature, the video shows, with Singh allegedly saying he could "def teach" her "a thing or two," speculating that she weighs less than 100 pounds, and asking if she was on birth control.*** https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ny-democrat-resigns-aide-allegedly-caught-trying-solicit-underaged-girl

Nobody is more misogynist than a politician who shelters a pervert who preys on teen girls.

***

Why not send billions to billionaires?

A far-left nonprofit accused of siding with criminals for its work to deplete the justice system while working inside local prosecution offices is nearly entirely funded by federal government agencies, including Department of Justice.

The Vera Institute of Justice – a Soros-linked nonprofit – has received $290 million from the federal government over the last 12 months alone for its work in immigration – to help illegal immigrants avoid deportation – and the criminal justice system. If its current contracts are extended for the next four years, disbursements could reach over $1 billion.

"We work to transform the immigration system because many of the problems that we see in the criminal legal system are just the same in the immigration system. And by transform, what I mean is to shrink both of those systems," Vera Justice's president, Nick Turner, said.

Vera funds radical-left agendas in prosecution and law enforcement offices around the country. Fox News Digital found they advocate to defund the police, they partner with district attorney offices to artificially manipulate "racial disparities" in prosecution decisions for criminals and openly state their mission is to demolish what they deem to be a "racist" system. *** https://www.foxnews.com/media/doj-federal-agencies-pour-hundreds-millions-soros-linked-group-accused-trying-nullify-law

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What would make Colorado perfect? I know: more adults exposing themselves to kids!

A majority of Colorado Democrats in the state House voted against a measure that would enhance criminal penalties for indecent exposure in view of a minor, and one state lawmaker claimed the bill could be used to "ban" drag shows and harm transgender people.

Outlining her frustrations with the measure from the House floor Saturday, state Rep. Leslie Herod, a Democrat who has represented a Denver-area district in the state House since 2017, said the proposed law uses language like other measures around the nation meant to "target" transgender people.

"These types of laws have been used to ban drag shows, to target individuals who use the restroom — the sex they identify with, a public restroom — to charge them with felony charges," Herod claimed. "I'm very concerned about the attacks against the transgender community that are happening across the country."

Introduced by Democrats, HB23-1135 would take criminal penalties for indecent exposure from a class 1 misdemeanor to a class 6 felony if committed in view of a person who is under 18. The measure passed with unanimous Republican support despite 27 of the 46 Democratic representatives voting against the bill.*** https://www.foxnews.com/politics/colorado-dems-vote-against-harsh-penalties-indecent-exposure-kids-because-could-ban-drag-shows

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Cavalier attitude toward killing two people.

Former Bradley student Stephanie Melgoza was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Thursday as the result of striking and killing two pedestrians while driving drunk in East Peoria [Illinois] in April 2022.

Melgoza faced between six to 28 years in prison after pleading guilty without a plea deal to two charges of aggravated DUI and two charges of reckless driving. Three smaller charges were dropped during her plea. Each count of aggravated DUI carried a sentence range between three and 14 years.*** https://www.bradleyscout.com/news/melgoza-sentenced-to-14-years-after-fatal-dui

youtube

Just before 20:00 she starts playing dumb while the arresting officer's body cam is recording.

***

Conflict of interest? What's that?

Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan resigned Tuesday morning following reports that she had been consulting for a private cannabis company at the same time as her office was auditing the state's marijuana program.

Fagan, a Democrat, will leave office after May 8. She said that while she is "confident" that an ethics investigation will show that she followed the law, her work for the company has become a "distraction."

“While I am confident that the ethics investigation will show that I followed the state’s legal and ethical guidelines in trying to make ends meet for my family, it is clear that my actions have become a distraction from the important and critical work of the Secretary of State’s office,” Fagan said in a statement. “Protecting our state’s democracy and ensuring faith in our elected leaders — these are the reasons I ran for this office. They are also the reasons I will be submitting my resignation today.”

Fagan admitted last week to accepting a role at the cannabis firm Veriede Holding, an affiliate of La Mota, bringing in $10,000 a month in additional income. Her contract indicated that Fagan would receive a $30,000 bonus if the firm obtained a business license in a state other than Oregon or New Mexico, according to The Oregonian.

The private company also donated around $250,000 to her campaign, along with contributions to other top Democrats, including Gov. Tina Kotek.*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/democratic-secretary-of-state-resigns-after-admitting-to-secret-deal-with-marijuana-industry

***

Nice Institute for Justice win

IJ just put up two big wins for free speech and economic liberty—victories for both our clients and the U.S. Constitution. The case involves a group of kindly ladies from Northern California and their nonprofit, Full Circle of Living and Dying. Full Circle helps the dying and their loved ones through their final days. It also helps families plan home funerals without a licensed funeral director, just as people the world over have traditionally done for centuries.

That, as you’ve likely already guessed, was a major no-no according to the state funeral board. Even though home funerals are legal in all 50 states and Full Circle’s services were limited to providing moral support, advice, and occasional assistance in conducting home funerals, the board argued Full Circle was an unlicensed “funeral establishment” and in late 2019 ordered the women who operate Full Circle to shut down.

IJ filed suit to challenge that order, and earlier this year we scored two major first-round victories. The court ruled both that the First Amendment forbids California from silencing Full Circle’s guides and that California could not require Full Circle, a nonprofit with an annual budget of $20,000, to build a traditional full-service funeral home to help people who have no interest in traditional funerals. And though Full Circle’s case isn’t over yet—the court will hold a trial later this year on whether California can require Full Circle’s guides to obtain funeral director licenses—the importance of these rulings cannot be overstated.*** https://ij.org/ll/ij-win-puts-two-more-nails-in-the-coffin-of-californias-funeral-monopoly/

***

Feds pick a fight with a Catholic hospital that serves the poor.

Saint Francis Hospital system is a Catholic hospital that serves everyone regardless of faith in Oklahoma. Surprise! St Francis has a chapel. Like every other Roman Catholic chapel or church, it keeps a candle burning next to the tabernacle. It's part of the Faith.

Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services demands that St Francis extinguish the candle for safety reasons.

The candle is in a double glass receptacle with a brass top. I haven't heard of such a candle starting a fire in a Roman Catholic church.

The CMS letter to St Francis is linked. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has requested CMS to grant a waiver.

If CMS de-accredits St Francis, the hospital will suffer such crippling financial losses that it will go bankrupt and close. It will no longer be able to serve the people of Oklahoma.

Saint Francis was a wonderfully humble holy man who lived in poverty. St. Thomas Becket defended freedom of religion against King Henry II and the elites of English society. Elites murdered him in a church and scattered his brains on the floor.

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BabylonBee says

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Too bad we don't have a law titled ‘‘Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012’’ Pub.L. 112–105, 126 Stat. 291. Oh, wait....

Multiple lawmakers sold their shares in First Republic Bank in the weeks before the firm collapsed and was sold to JPMorgan Chase by financial regulators.

First Republic Bank imploded on Monday, weeks after Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank similarly collapsed, as account holders with balances above the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation threshold rushed to withdraw their funds. Periodic transaction disclosure forms reveal that multiple lawmakers jettisoned their shares in First Republic Bank or acquired shares in JPMorgan Chase over the past two months, a phenomenon which follows accusations that some lawmakers routinely buy stocks at opportune times and cut losses by selling shares.

The lawmakers who sold shares of First Republic Bank indeed avoided heavy losses: the firm’s stock fell from $121.54 at the beginning of the year to $3.51 at the time of the collapse.

Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) sold between $1,001 and $15,000 in First Republic Bank shares on March 16 and bought between $1,001 and $15,000 in JPMorgan Chase shares on March 22. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 shares of First Republic Bank shares on March 9 but likewise sold the same indeterminate amount of the assets on March 15, as well as purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 in JPMorgan Chase stock on both March 3 and March 14. His disclosure form said the shares belonged to his wife and dependent child.

Rep. John Curtis (R-UT) meanwhile sold between $1,000 and $15,000 in First Republic Bank shares on March 16, and the wife of Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) sold between $1,001 and $15,000 in First Republic Bank stock on March 20. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) also sold between $1,001 and $15,000 in First Republic Bank shares on March 15.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) previously bought between $1,001 and $15,000 of stock in New York Community Bancorp, the company which would acquire Signature Bank, on March 17.*** https://www.dailywire.com/news/lawmakers-dumped-their-shares-in-first-republic-bank-before-the-company-collapsed

***

Nellie Bowels notes

*** → Et tu, Sotomayor? Meanwhile, Sonia Sotomayor has been paid more than $3 million by Penguin Random House—and didn’t recuse herself from several cases involving the publisher.***

→ Summer is coming: Something happened on a New York City subway car that caused three men to restrain a homeless man and subway dancer, Jordan Neely. One of those men was a Marine, and he held Neely in a chokehold until Neely passed out and later died. There’s a video of it all. It’s been ruled a homicide. Jordan Neely had 42 prior arrests, including four for assault, but we have to wait to learn what actually happened in that car. That’s not stopping AOC, who as usual was a model of restraint: “Jordan Neely was murdered. But bc Jordan was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected w/ passive headlines + no charges. It’s disgusting.” (NYC Mayor Eric Adams called AOC’s comments not “very responsible.”) Protesters are already gathering in the subway. I’m too old for another 2020. ***

→ Oregon Democrats want to decriminalize homeless encampments: Oregon is filled with tent cities, and now the state’s Democrats want to make it officially legal. This one’s a little like California legalizing weed, in that it was already completely legal. But now, Oregon lawmakers want to fine you if you ask a homeless encampment to form elsewhere. Yes: you will pay a $1,000 fine if you so much as ask for someone to clear off the sidewalk. “Excuse me, but your pitbull is gnawing my son’s—” That’ll be ten Benjamins, NIMBY!

I used to walk whole blocks of San Francisco where sidewalks were taken over by encampments, not an inch of space free, which was fine because every morning I just hopped off the curb and into the street for a couple blocks. So, I hope no one plans on using a wheelchair in any Oregon city because that would be another grand every time they require a tent to move. The disabled really need to think about not being disabled! Kind of rude to want cities to have sidewalks.

Parks? Did someone mention public parks? Okay, now you’re basically a Nazi. We’re gonna need a bigger fine.

→ AOC and Matt Gaetz collab: The two hotheaded congresspeople—one a Democratic Socialist from New York, the other a paleoconservative from Florida—have come together to try and ban members of Congress and their spouses from owning and trading individual stocks. It’s called the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act. ***

→ I thought banning gas stoves was a conspiracy theory? Now, hold on. I was told just in January of this year that the gas stove ban was a fake right-wing culture war thing.

NYT: “No One Is Coming for Your Gas Stove Anytime Soon”

Time: “How Gas Stoves Became the Latest Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars”

Salon: “Rumors of a gas stove ban ignite a right-wing culture war”

MSNBC: “No, the woke mob is not coming for your gas stove.”

AP News: “FACT FOCUS: Biden administration isn’t banning gas stoves”

The Washington Post: “GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars”

Which is why it’s so weird because just this week, New York state lawmakers banned gas stoves from all new construction. So it definitely does seem like Dems are coming for gas stoves, in that they just banned them in one of America’s most populous states.

There’s usually a slightly longer lag between when the mainstream press tells us something is a crazy lie and when the press says okay, fine, it’s not a lie, it’s actually true, and also it’s a good thing—so this is surprising. I’ll be over here huffing carbon oxides and vapors...

***

Why was he out of jail?

Court records show [Zion Teasley] was charged in 2020 with 13 felonies — including five kidnapping charges.

They were dismissed in a plea deal a year later in which he admitted three felonies: armed robbery with a deadly weapon, robbery and disorderly conduct. He was released from prison in November 2022 and was on probation at the time of Heike’s slaying.

He is now "charged with the brutal murder of hiker Lauren Heike — as it emerged she’d been chased and then stabbed 15 times in the back and chest."

You still a firearm in someone's face and take his money, you've changed his life. You've come awfully close to ending it. You should be out killing people after only two years.

***

Now's the time to invest in platinum

COOK COUNTY, Ill. - A Cook County man was arrested after police discovered over 600 catalytic converters at his residence.

Cook County Sheriff's police responded to a burglary alarm Sunday at a home in the 6000 block of 128th Place in unincorporated Worth Township.

Officers knocked on the door but no one responded, so they walked around the property to make sure there wasn't a burglary in progress. That's when officers saw hundreds of catalytic converters in a metal crate with others stacked along the fence.

Officers returned to the home Tuesday and executed a search warrant at the residence belonging to 40-year-old Ramsy Sandoka.*** https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/over-600-catalytic-converters-recovered-in-cook-county-bust

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Nellie Bowles writes

→ Speaking of ways I don’t want to die: The movement to actually enforce traffic laws is gaining steam. Here’s The Washington Post appearing to agree that terrible drivers with tons of tickets shouldn’t be on the road. Meanwhile, of course, Congress has been calling any traffic law enforcement racism.***

→ Wanting safe subways is “bourgeois”: We have an Englishman staying with us right now, and it’s funny talking to someone from a country where liberals want, fight for, and actually expect clean, safe subways and clean, safe parks. In England and much of Europe, these aren’t controversial goals. Public transit is a point of pride, a brilliant use of public funds. Here in the US of A, for some godforsaken reason, the good liberals who run cities have decided that wanting safe subways and clean, fentanyl-free parks is right-wing and lame. Which leads us to Emma Vigeland, an influential leftist media personality, co-host of The Majority Report, a perfect representative of the movement, so here’s her full quote this week:

“I was hit, at one point, sitting on the subway by a man who was having a mental health episode. . . hit me in the face and body and it was jarring, right?” Vigeland says. “Every one of us who’s taken public transit has had this kind of situation happen. . . . And I was scared, I was hit. But my fear is not the primary object of what we should be focusing on right now; it’s the fact that this person is in pain. The politics of dehumanization privileges the bourgeois concern of people’s immediate discomfort in this narrow, narrow instance.”

Like me, Emma went to fancy private schools before she became a socialist and I became. . . whatever this is. Anyway, I love her private school-meets-American-socialism dig at the people who want safe subways: She calls it “bridge-and-tunneler anti-homeless hysteria.” Emma, I agree there are some bridge-and-tunnel vibes going on in the subway conversation. Like ugh, all these women who don’t want to be punched in the face, wandering around with ugly purses. It’s jarring! *** https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-the-greatest-show-on-earth

***

I usually disapprove of priest killing, but I'm willing to consider exceptions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, May 12, 2023

Jury Convicts Priest of Sex Trafficking Three Victims in Northern Ohio

A federal jury in Northern District of Ohio convicted Michael J. Zacharias, a priest, of five counts of sex trafficking. The charges related to three victims, two of whom Zacharias trafficked when they were minors and as adults. The evidence presented to the jury detailed how Zacharias paid the victims to engage in sex acts with him using the victims’ fear of serious harm to compel their compliance.

Specifically, the jury heard evidence of how Zacharias first met the victims when they were young boys, and he was a Seminarian at St. Catherine’s Catholic Parish school in Toledo, Ohio, and how Zacharias began grooming the boys for commercial sex acts, using his position as a priest and teacher to ingratiate himself with the boys and their families as a trusted friend, mentor and spiritual counselor. The defendant overcame the victims’ resistance to his eventual commercial sex overtures by gradually sexualizing conversations and conduct with them. At the same time, the victims were developing serious opiate addictions, using pain medication and, later, heroin. Zacharias waited to propose commercial sex until he knew the victims were so heavily involved in drug abuse that it was impacting their daily lives, physical and mental well-being and ability to maintain a stable school or work life.

The victims’ testimony explained how, in varying degrees, they submitted to Zacharias’ commercial sex solicitations because they feared the psychological harm of losing Zacharias as a father figure and friend, losing their connection to the Church and God, and suffering the painful symptoms of opioid withdrawal that could be alleviated with the money provided by Zacharias to purchase drugs. One victim in particular – the older brother of another victim – also explained how he feared Zacharias would sexually abuse his minor brother and others if he did not continue to comply with the defendant’s commercial sex solicitations.***

Sentencing has not yet been scheduled. Zacharias faces a fifteen-year mandatory minimum and lifetime maximum sentence. *** https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jury-convicts-priest-sex-trafficking-three-victims-northern-ohio

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Abe Fortas resigned from the Supreme Court this day, 15 May, in 1969.

Fortas had been a fixer for Lyndon Johnson and continued providing legal work to him while a member of the Court. The thing that brought him down was taking money from Millionaire industrialist Louis E. Wolfson and providing legal services to him while Fortas was a justice. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/01/23/fortas-tie-to-wolfson-is-detailed/0b15ab1b-ca34-4a99-be65-51967ea123a6/

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Excellent column by Kat Rosenfield

During the 2017 peak of the #MeToo movement, the conversation about sexual harassment came down to two related but ultimately separate questions. On the one hand, there was the question of what men shouldn’t do; on the other, there was the question of what women could be expected to tolerate.

This was where some women, usually but not always older, rolled their eyes. Did an awkward joke, a bad date, or — as one memorable entry in the infamous Shitty Media Men list alleged — a “weird lunch” really constitute a form of harassment, let alone a cancellable offence? But other women, usually but not always younger, clucked their tongues: it was only because women kept putting up with such behaviour that men kept thinking they could get away with it.***

This question has been on my mind this week, for the most tragic of reasons. On 1st May, a 30-year-old man named Jordan Neely was choked to death on a crowded New York City subway train by a 24-year-old Marine named Daniel Penny. Neely, who was homeless and mentally ill, was reportedly screaming and confronting passengers; he was killed after Penny put him in a chokehold, while two other passengers held him down. Penny, in a statement released through his lawyers, said he did not intend to kill Neely.

This incident was preventable. Long before his death, Neely was known to New York City authorities as a person who could not manage independent living, and who had been spiralling in recent years, desperately in need of help. For him to die on the dirty floor of a subway car, screaming and defecating on himself while three strangers held him by the arms, legs, and neck, he had to be first failed at every turn by a system that was supposed to shelter and protect him — not just from doing harm, but from being harmed by others when his mental illness manifested in frightening ways.***

To what extent this campaign could succeed is not clear. There has always been a baseline level of criminality and antisocial behaviour on the subway; sexual harassment and assault is so ubiquitous that brushing up against it is all but inevitable. I was groped, flashed, or masturbated at probably two dozen times during the seven years I spent living in New York. When a friend moved to NYC last year, I told her that she couldn’t truly call herself a New Yorker until she exited a crowded subway car to discover that someone had ejaculated on her coat. (I was only partly kidding.) It’s not that anyone thinks these things are okay; it’s more that they’re expected, a sad fact of life in a city of 8.5 million people, one of those things you cannot change and hence have to find a way to put up with. You look away, you shrug it off, you don’t let it ruin your day because if you did, it would ruin all of your days.***

But if it was difficult to know exactly where a tolerance for breaches of decorum became apologia for criminal harassment, it was even harder to identify, after Jordan Neely’s death, where the tacit agreement to tolerate becomes a duty to intervene. How do we know when to stand by, when to step in, when to look away, when to be afraid?

Here, one might have expected that many of the same voices who argued so vehemently against the notion of resilience in the midst of MeToo — the ones who believed that the solution to harassment lay not in teaching women to be assertive, but in teaching men not to abuse — would now demand zero tolerance for male aggression on public transit. If you argue that a woman can be traumatised by bawdy humour in the office or awkward come-ons in a bar, surely you would agree that she’s entitled to be fearful when trapped underground on a metal tube with an erratically-behaving stranger twice her size.*** The truth is, eyewitnesses did report that Neely was behaving in a threatening way, and other people on the train were calling 911 well before his confrontation with Penny, suggesting that whatever was happening, it was a cut above the ordinary subway madness that New Yorkers are usually so good at ignoring. But it is also true that the tragic conclusion of this incident seems, at least in part, like the result of a cultivated fragility — the kind that results when you encourage people to view every uncomfortable situation as a trauma in the making, every unpleasant interaction as a precursor to a far worse harm, every upset as an offence for which there must be consequences. That mindset, so ubiquitous in the wake of MeToo, so popular among progressives in general, says that no breach of decorum or moment of discomfort is too insignificant to ignore. It must be registered. It must be punished. It’s nothing more or less than a call for constant vigilance. The thing about that: when you demand vigilance, you get vigilantes.

***

Weed study from Denmark.

Hjorthøj, C., Compton, W., Starzer, M., Nordholm, D., Einstein, E., Erlangsen, A., Nordentoft, M, Volkow, N.D., and Han, B. (2023). Association between cannabis use disorder and schizophrenia stronger in young males than in females. Psychological Medicine, 1-7. found

Young males might be particularly susceptible to the effects of cannabis on schizophrenia. At a population level, assuming causality, one-fifth of cases of schizophrenia among young males might be prevented by averting CUD. Results highlight the importance of early detection and treatment of CUD and policy decisions regarding cannabis use and access, particularly for 16–25-year-olds.*** https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/association-between-cannabis-use-disorder-and-schizophrenia-stronger-in-young-males-than-in-females/E1F8F0E09C6541CB8529A326C3641A68

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Doctors have access to really cool drugs

Denver cardiologist Stephen Matthews was arrested outside a Denver courtroom Monday morning and prosecutors say he is being charged in nine new criminal cases, bringing the total number of his alleged victims to 10.

The 35-year-old had previously been charged in just one case. Police handcuffed Matthews and took him directly to the Denver Jail.***

Matthews said he had "consensual sex" with a woman he met on the Hinge dating app. But the woman said after drinking with Matthews, she had no recollection of having sex with him and did not consent to engaging in sex. She said she is convinced she was drugged and pressed charges with Denver police. In follow-up reporting, CBS News Colorado found several other women recounting similar encounters with Matthews.

Monday morning, he was scheduled for a preliminary hearing in that initial case from January. But before any proceedings began, as Matthews was outside the courtroom talking to his family Denver police showed up, handcuffed Matthews and led him away to the Denver City Jail.***

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Philly capable of change?

*** And yesterday's election [in Philly] was a bit of a stunning upset as former City Councilwoman Cherelle Parker won. She will most likely become Philadelphia's first black female mayor.

In the era of identity politics, Parker's victory is unquestionably historic. It also, once again, debunks many of the left-wing claims about "white supremacy" and anti-black racism being systemic in the city. But perhaps even more shocking was the political platform of Parker's campaign. In a city plagued with violent crime, she ran as a candidate who would be tough on crime, hire more police officers to patrol the streets, and support stop and frisk.*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/philly-essentially-elected-its-first-black-female-mayor-last-night-and-she-supports-stop-and-frisk

I have no problem, and the Court has no problem, with stop & frisk when it's based on reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed & dangerous & committing a crime. I do have a problem when it's based on reasonable suspicion that the suspect is a minority.

Indeed, the Terry majority noted

The wholesale harassment by certain elements of the police community, of which minority groups, particularly Negroes, frequently complain, will not be stopped by the exclusion of any evidence from any criminal trial.

***

Conflict of interest? What's that?

Earlier this month, Shemia Fagan resigned as Oregon's secretary of state following the public release of her ties to an embattled cannabis company she was auditing.

Gov. Tina Kotek (D-OR) reportedly knew of Fagan's activities eight days before the controversy hit the press.

Kotek and Fagan met on April 19 for a meeting to “discuss the legislative session and other topics unrelated to cannabis,” Kotek’s spokesperson told the Oregonian.

During that conversation, Fagan “briefly mentioned” she had bowed out from the audit that was still in process “due to a consulting contract,” spokeswoman Elisabeth Shepard said in an email to the Oregonian. Kotek claimed she was unaware of the details until the story broke in the news.

On March 29, the Willamette Week broke the story of Fagan’s connection to La Mota, the second-largest cannabis dispensary chain in Oregon. The investigation disclosed the company gave over more than $200,000 to the state’s top Democrats, including $45,000 to Fagan.

In the following days, the publication received another tip about Fagan, setting the controversy into full swing. In late April, it was revealed that Fagan signed a contract with Veriede Holding LLC, whose principals are Rosa Cazares and Aaron Mitchell, the owners of La Mota.

Records reported by the Oregonian in May show that shortly after Fagan took office, the secretary of state supposedly shared the audit proposal with La Mota cannabis chain co-owner Cazares prior to its publication.*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crime/kotek-aware-fagan-cannabis-contract-before-audit-went-public

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Spur trust? Give me a break.

Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill Thursday that puts guardrails on how law enforcement use deceptive tactics when questioning kids, the culmination of a two-year legislative push and ending fears that the governor may veto the proposal.

The new law does not prohibit law enforcement from lying to kids during interrogations. But it does generally mean that any information — like confessions — gained that way can’t be used by prosecutors during subsequent trials. Supporters said the bill was a step toward building trust between the criminal justice system and the communities it impacts, while cutting down on the potential for false convictions of children.

The law also requires law enforcement to record juveniles interrogations. Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat who co-sponsored the bill, said Thursday it represented an opportunity “to reset and build community-driven pathways to our collective safety.”*** https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/new-law-aims-to-spur-trust-between-colorado-police-and-kids/ar-AA1bp1qq

Maybe if politicians didn't vilify the police at every opportunity, the community might have more trust in police. [Not that police couldn't help themselves a little.]

What happen is, for example, Bob & Bill commit a crime. Bob is reluctant to talk until the police falsely tell him that Bill has spilled his guts, blaming Bob. Bob that spills his guts, incriminating both himself & Bill. Police then go to Bill and let him know that he can help himself out by confessing because Bob blamed him.

Too, video recording interrogations is not going to benefit the defendant in all cases. In many cases, juries will be able to see the police may have been blunt, but they didn't coerce any confession.

***

Connecticut says you can't discriminate against rapists.

Connecticut has amended its antidiscrimination statute. The bill analysis says

§§ 2-6 — SEXUAL ORIENTATION Under current antidiscrimination law, “sexual orientation” generally means having a preference for heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality or having a history of or being identified with this preference. However, its definition expressly excludes any behavior that is a sex offense crime.

The bill redefines “sexual orientation” to means a person’s identity in relation to the gender or genders to which they are romantically, emotionally, or sexually attracted, including any identity that a person may have previously expressed or is perceived by another person to hold. This new definition specifically applies to antidiscrimination laws subject to enforcement by CHRO, as well as laws prohibiting nondiscrimination in awarding agency, municipal public works and quasi-public agency project contracts.

By removing the exclusion of sex offenses, Connecticut made it illegal to discriminate against flashers, child molesters, and rapists. The bill passed 132 - 17.

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b/c catching criminals is hard and sometimes dangerous

A Shelby County, Tennessee man's surveillance camera alerted him to thieves in the driveway around 0200 on Sat. He walked out the front door, and they started shooting at him. He fired four or five times at them. video

Police arrived after the shooting and arrested him for reckless endangerment because "the man told them that he couldn’t clearly see what he was targeting and admitted to firing shots with his eyes closed due to being scared and shooting at the suspects as they fled."

The video looks like his shots were aimed at the people shooting at him. The video also shows the criminals shooting at him after he stopped shooting. https://www.foxnews.com/us/tennessee-man-charged-felony-reckless-endangerment-returning-fire-armed-auto-thieves

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If there's no effective law enforcement, why not?

Maryland police said the guardian of four teens arrested for auto theft last week arrived to pick them up in a stolen vehicle.

The Charles County Police Department said officers patrolling in Waldorf, Maryland, at about 1 p.m. on May 16 saw two Hyundai vehicles in front of a business. A computer check revealed they were reported stolen.

When the officers attempted to conduct a traffic stop, the drivers of the two vehicles sped off.***

From the two vehicles, police arrested 18-year-old Deshaun Deamonte Whitaker and 21-year-old Vincent Lee Alston, both of Washington, D.C., who were both charged with theft, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and rogue and vagabond.

Whitaker was released on $2,000 bond and Alston was held without bond in the Charles County Detention Center.

Four juveniles were also arrested and charged with theft and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.***

Police said a female guardian was set to pick up the four juveniles, but the guardian and two other females arrived in what appeared to be another stolen vehicle, which left after the three women were dropped off at the police station.

Officers located the vehicle on a nearby street, which reportedly had a broken back window and steering column damage. When the officer ordered everyone out of the vehicle, the driver fled, nearly hitting one of the officers.***

Anthony Matthew Stewart, 19, of Washington, D.C., was driving the vehicle and arrested after a brief chase on foot. He was charged with first- and second-degree assault, unauthorized use of a vehicle and providing a false name to police. Stewart also reportedly had active warrants for his arrest.

Also in the vehicle were three juveniles who were apprehended. One of the juveniles, a 16-year-old boy, had active arrest warrants, and a 13-year-old girl was reported missing from another county. All three juveniles were charged with theft and unauthorized use of a vehicle.*** https://www.foxnews.com/us/maryland-guardian-arrives-stolen-vehicle-take-custody-teens-arrested-auto-theft-police-say

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Rachel Rollins, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, says she will resign.

A DoJ Inspector General report was highly critical of her.

This report describes an investigation by the Department of Justice (Department or DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) that began with allegations concerning the presence of U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Rachael Rollins at a Democratic Party fundraiser featuring First Lady Dr. Jill Biden on July 14, 2022. Available information indicated that Rollins arrived at a private home in Andover, Massachusetts, where the fundraiser was being held, driven in a government vehicle by a subordinate employee of the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office (MA USAO). After news stories reported Rollins’s presence at the fundraiser and questioned whether Rollins violated the Hatch Act, 5 U.S.C. §§ 7321–7326, a federal statute that limits the political activities of federal employees of the Executive Branch, Rollins posted a tweet suggesting that she had “approval” to be there.1

The OIG opened this investigation to determine whether Rollins complied with Department policies and procedures governing attendance or appearance at partisan political events. During the course of our investigation, the OIG received multiple additional allegations concerning Rollins, some relating to other alleged political activities and some relating to possible violations of the federal gift rules, the government’s travel regulations, misuse of position, noncompliance with recusal decisions, and noncompliance with other Department policies. The most concerning was an allegation that Rollins secretly disclosed sensitive, non-public DOJ information to the Boston Herald about a potential DOJ investigation she and her office were recused from and that she may have done so for political purposes in relation to an upcoming local election.*** https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/23-071.pdf

Ms Rollins is a leftist. Her appointed as a federal prosecutor was sharply contested.

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Religious freedom case

A group of Jewish parents petitioned a federal court Monday to block a California law that prohibits education funding for children with disabilities from going to religious private schools, even though secular private schools are eligible.

The group of parents, which sought to use Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding at an Orthodox Jewish school, filed a lawsuit against the state in March, arguing that a state law excluding religious schools from the program was discriminatory. On Monday, the group, which is represented by attorneys from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, petitioned a Los Angeles federal court to block the law while litigation continues.

“It’s already outrageous enough that California legislators are denying special education benefits to Jewish kids with disabilities,” Eric Rassbach, the vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund, said in a statement. “But even worse, they’re denying benefits specifically because these kids want to go to a Jewish school. We’re asking the court to put a stop to this discriminatory law and let these kids get the benefits and services they need.”

Rassbach said the California law was harming Jewish families, and urged the court to "block this discriminatory law, and ensure that access to essential benefits isn’t cut off from families and schools just because they are religious."*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/education/california-parents-disability-funding-jewish-school

The case is Loffman v. California Department of Education, 23-cv-1832 (C.D. Cal.). The judge is Josephine L. Staton. Defendants have not yet filed an answer.

Odd note: One of the plaintiffs is Fedora Nick. Never seen a name like that.

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Family of Christian Glass to receive $19 million in settlement over son’s 2021 police shooting death

The state of Colorado and three local law enforcement agencies agreed to a record $19 million settlement in the death of Christian Glass, a 22-year-old who was shot and killed by police in June in Silver Plume after he crashed his car and called 911 for help.

The settlement is the largest involving police misconduct in Colorado history, surpassing the $15 million paid in 2021 to the family of Elijah McClain, who died at the hands of Aurora police officers and paramedics during a violent 2019 arrest.

Along with the financial agreement, the state of Colorado and the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office have agreed to non-financial concessions that include using Glass’s death in police training scenarios to teach the importance of de-escalation, the creation of a crisis response team in Clear Creek County and an agreement that Glass’s parents can participate in law enforcement training by speaking about the loss of their son, Noelle Phillips reports. https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/23/christian-glass-shooting-lawsuit-settlement-police-misconduct

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Where is this a problem?

Illinois just enacted a law the prohibits using license plate readers for

the purpose of investigating or enforcing a law that:

(1) denies or interferes with a person's right to choose or obtain reproductive health care services or any lawful health care services as defined by the Lawful Health Care Activity Act; or

(2) permits the detention or investigation of a person based on the person's immigration status.

(c) Any law enforcement agency, including an out-of-state law enforcement agency, that uses ALPR systems shall require other out-of-state law enforcement agencies to acknowledge that any shared ALPR images or data generated in this State will not be used in a manner that violates subsection

(b) by executing a written declaration before obtaining that data. If a written declaration is not executed before sharing or transfer of the data, the law enforcement agency shall not share the ALPR images or data with the out-of-state law enforcement agency.

(d) ALPR information shall be held confidentially to the fullest extent permitted by law.

It is now Illinois Vehicle Code Section 2-130. https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1577114/

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It's not like shot someone like Alec Baldwin. Oh, uh, well....

IONIA, Mich. (AP) — A western Michigan man who pleaded no contest to shooting an 84-year-old woman campaigning against abortion rights at his home was sentenced to community service Tuesday.

Richard Harvey, 75, was ordered to complete 100 hours of community service. Judge Suzanne Hoseth Kreeger also gave him a suspended jail sentence of two months and a delayed sentence of one year on probation.

Harvey pleaded no contest last month to felonious assault, careless discharge of a firearm causing injury and reckless discharge of a firearm.

Kreeger also must pay $347.19 in restitution and cannot have any contact with the woman he shot, 84-year-old Joan Jacobson.*** https://www.9and10news.com/2023/05/24/michigan-man-gets-community-service-for-shooting-anti-abortion-campaigner/

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Philly paid him $1.3M per murder

Shaurn Thomas was a millionaire, but prosecutors say he killed a man over a $1,200 drug debt.

Thomas was paid more than $4 million three years ago after spending 24 years behind bars for a murder conviction that was later overturned.***

“He said it’s his third homicide and he said he can’t go back to jail,” she said.*** https://www.pennlive.com/crime/2023/05/philly-man-got-4m-after-his-murder-case-was-overturned-hes-now-accused-of-murder-over-1200.html

I love these cases in which a manifestly guilty defendant is removed from prison on an alleged procedural error. The media and The Innocence Project act like the murderer was somehow exonerated. No, these convictions are overturned on procedures that were fair and transparent and unrelated to factual guilt. Sometimes you have co-defendants who have reconsidered for a decade the wisdom of their confessing and decided to recant.

First, he argues that a Philadelphia Police Department Criminalistics Laboratory report dated December 16, 1994 was not discovered until after trial. * During Appellant's trial, the Commonwealth offered for identification a series of 14 photographs of a blue Chevrolet Caprice. N.T., 12/12/94, at 41–76. Counsel for the defense objected at which time the prosecutor stated that John and William Stallworth would testify that the photographs depicted the car used by Appellant during the robbery. Id. at 42. Later during trial, however, both Stallworths testified that a different car was used in the robbery. The prosecutor never asked John or William Stallworth to identify the blue Caprice depicted in the photographs and the trial court prevented these exhibits from going to the jury. N.T., 12/15/94, at 116–117. It is alleged that counsel for Appellant's co-defendant, Shaurn, discovered the Criminalistics Report in 2011. The report was apparently authored during the trial and it demonstrated that the Caprice was not used in the robbery and murder. Appellant asserts that this report is exculpatory and was wrongly withheld from the defense*

The second newly discovered fact upon which Appellant relies is the alleged recantation by William Stallworth. Specifically, in his PCRA petition, Appellant relies upon a declaration of Shaina A. Tyler, an investigator employed by the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. In this declaration, Ms. Tyler states that she visited William Stallworth on September 29, 2011 at which time “William Stallworth told [Ms. Tyler] that his testimony at the trial of Shaurn and Mustafa Thomas was a lie, and that he made up the entire story.” Declaration of Shaina A. Tyler, 22/23/11, at 1–2. On April 11, 2017, while this case was on appeal before this Court, William Stallworth apparently was interviewed again by a member of the Philadelphia District Attorney's CRU.4 During this second interview, William stated “[h]e was not present on 11/13/1990 for the robbery and murder of Domingo Martinez” and “[h]e does not believe, but has no first[-]hand knowledge, that Shaurn Thomas was there either.” Commonwealth v. Thomas, No. 2436 EDA 2014, 2017 WL 3159329, at *4, *5 (Pa. Super. Ct. July 25, 2017).

The nice thing is when Shaurn murders people it's probably no relative or friend of anyone at Innocence Project or the DA's office.

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The problem of non-police contacting violent people

For as long as emergency medicine has existed, being physically assaulted has been part of the job. Talking about feelings that come after an assault, though? Not so much.

That’s something that paramedics and others working in emergency medicine are trying to change, said Crystal Eastman, a paramedic instructor and “peer responder” at Denver Health. The sheer amount of violence discourages paramedics from reporting each time they’re assaulted, and the culture pushes them to act like it doesn’t affect them, she said.

Lt. Will Hargreaves, who oversees a team of about 15 paramedics at Denver Health and goes out on some calls, said on most days, an ambulance crew will have to restrain or sedate someone who’s being combative. Often, it’s because the person they need to treat doesn’t want them there or is worried about getting in trouble for their drug use, he said. Other times, people are confused because of their medical condition, especially if they were just revived from an overdose, Meg Wingerter reports. https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/29/paramedics-colorado-denver-health-violence-mental-health

Who signs up to be punched or stabbed by a junkie?

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Trying a local solution

Vehicle thefts in Westminster alone have exploded from 859 in 2020 to 1,259 last year.

But the misery around auto-related crimes goes further than just theft and this city of 115,000 is determined to do something. Last week, Westminster passed on first reading four ordinances that would address street racing, joy-riding, car parts theft and quicker restitution for victims.

In the big picture, the measures would bring the prosecution for several auto-related crimes in-house — to municipal court — sparing victims a trip to Brighton in Adams County or Golden in Jefferson County, depending on what side of the county line the offense occurred, John Aguilar reports. https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/29/westminster-auto-theft-catalytic-street-racing-joyride

Colorado's municipal courts can impose no more than 364 days of incarceration. C.R.S. § 13-10-113 (2023). If someone stole your car or its cats, you'd probably be happier if he served 90 days in jail than none at all due to a lazy or woke DA.

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Breaks my freakin' heart

The suspect in the 2005 disappearance of American Natalee Holloway in Aruba, Joran van der Sloot, has been "severely beaten" in a prison in Peru, his lawyer Maximo Altez told CBS News.

"It was a fight between prisoners. I don't know who assaulted Joran," Altez said, without providing any further detail on his client's condition.***

Van der Sloot is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence in Peru for the 2010 murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores in Lima. He's awaiting temporary extradition to the United States to face American charges of extortion and wire fraud related to promises he allegedly made to Holloway's family about leading authorities to her body.***

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Keep your violence off my, uh

BALTIMORE -- Anti-abortion rights demonstrators were attacked Friday, one brutally, after an ideological argument outside a Planned Parenthood in Baltimore, police said.

The attack involved the suspect tackling an 80-year-old man and pummeling a 73-year-old man before kicking him "with extreme force" in the face, police said.

Officers responded around 10:30 a.m. to the healthcare center on North Howard Street for the alleged assault, where witnesses said two men were attacked.

The responding officer found the more severely injured victim, a 73-year-old man, at a local business. According to police, the man had "a large lump forming on his right eyebrow and blood and swelling around the right eye and right side of his face."

The victim told police he was demonstrating outside Planned Parenthood when an unidentified man attacked a fellow demonstrator, identified as an 80-year-old man.

The victim said he immediately tried to help but was hit by the suspect and fell to the ground, where he was struck in the face. He allegedly told police he didn't remember anything after that. *** https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/anti-abortion-rights-demonstrators-assaulted-outside-baltimore-planned-parenthood-police-say/ - why won't tumblr save posts with working links????? Try pasting into your browser.

Schafer reportedly has been recovering at home while Crosby is currently receiving treatment for his injuries in the shock trauma facility at the University of Maryland. According to a police report, doctors diagnosed Crosby with a large hematoma, hyphemia, and head and neck pain.

Crosby’s “plate bone in his upper right cheek is completely fractured” and “is bleeding from some unidentified area behind his eye, and the bone eye orbit is completely shattered and will have to be replaced with metal,” Roswell said.

The attack left Crosby’s right eye swollen shut with blood dripping from his eye socket, forehead, and nose.*** https://www.dailywire.com/news/pro-choice-activist-brutally-attacks-two-elderly-pro-life-advocates-outside-baltimore-planned-parenthood-report - why won't tumblr save posts with working links????? Try pasting into your browser.

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When she's sentenced to straight probation, tell me again about the sexism of the legal system

A female employee in a Pennsylvania school allegedly groped a teenage student during an in-school suspension, which continued throughout the day and with "sexual activity" in her car that evening, police said.

Megan Carlisle, 37, also allegedly sent explicit pictures and videos of herself to the 15-year-old student and his 16-year-old friend, Northwest Regional Police said in a press release.

Her alleged sexual escapades with an underage student happened while she was employed as a paraprofessional and in-school-suspension monitor in the Elizabethtown Area School District in Lancaster County, which has since fired her.

After Carlisle allegedly "engaged in sexual activity" with the victim in her car on April 28, she sent him $20 via Cash App for food, the student reportedly told police, according to FOX 43. He also reportedly asked her for vape pods, which she allegedly bought for him the next day.*** https://www.foxnews.com/us/female-middle-school-monitor-sex-teen-who-hit-her-up-vapes-cash-police why does tumblr hate links?

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#Youtube

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