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criminal justice
Trump Order to Kill Cashless Bail Will Exacerbate Inequality While Doing Nothing to Fight Crime, Experts Say
"Cash bail is a system that preys on poor people," Wanda Bertram, of the Prison Policy Initiative, told Common Dreams.
Aug 25, 2025
US President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders on Monday aimed at ending the policy of cashless bail for people accused of crimes, a move criminal justice reform advocates say will heighten the already massive inequality within the system while doing little to stop lawbreaking.
One order requires Washington, DC, which the president currently controls under "emergency authority," to end its cashless bail program. The other directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify other jurisdictions around the country with cashless bail so that they can have their federal funds restricted or suspended.
Several states, including Illinois, New York, California, and New Jersey, have moved to significantly reduce or eliminate the use of cash requirements for those accused of crimes to be released pretrial. DC, meanwhile, was one of the first cities to implement the policy.
Jeremy Cherson, communications director for the Bail Project, told Common Dreams that cash bail creates a "two-tiered system of justice—one where people with money, regardless of risk, can pay bail and be released, whereas people without money will be detained, maybe unnecessarily, just because they can't afford to pay a bail amount."
More than 70% of the people currently held in jails—over 400,000 people—have not been convicted of a crime and are instead awaiting trial, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. In 2022, a report by the US Commission on Civil Rights found that 60% of them were there because they could not afford to pay bail.
People in pretrial detention are disproportionately racial minorities and those in poverty. A 2021 study by the Brookings Institution found that the average person in pretrial detention loses $30,000 on average during the process.
"Cash bail is a system that preys on poor people," Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative, told Common Dreams. "They can lose their jobs and their housing. They can get disconnected from critical medical care that they might need. It's a very destabilizing experience."
Trump has claimed that cashless bail allows criminals to get out of jail without punishment and has caused cities to become cesspools of criminality.
"Somebody kills somebody, they go and don't worry about it," Trump told reporters on Monday as he signed the order. "No cash. Come back in a couple of months. We'll give you a trial. You never see the person again."
In a press conference earlier this month, Trump claimed that "every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster."
"That's what started the problem in New York, and they don't change it," he said. "That's what started it in Chicago. I mean, bad politicians started it, bad leadership started it. But that was the one thing that's central, no cash bail."
But as Cherson explained, cashless bail policies are not a "get-out-of-jail-free card."
"They are often measured, calculated approaches that create a system and processes where people are evaluated for risks of flight or risks to other individuals if they're released, and a series of conditions are set against them, or they're detained pretrial," he says. "They're not all let out. So that's often misunderstood about what bail reform is."
Instead of using financial means, judges determine who will remain in detention based on an individual's flight risk or the danger they may pose to the community.
The key, Cherson says, is that "they need to have individualized hearings where we are making determinations about what happens if we release somebody based on more than a hunch."
According to an investigation by FactCheck.org, across all the states that have ended or limited cash bail, only one person charged with murder has ever been released without bail. A Rockville, Illinois, judge released the defendant in 2024 because the case against him was exceptionally weak, and the judge still required him to meet "fairly strict requirements" while awaiting trial.
"There is nothing to suggest that cashless bail makes cities less safe," Bertram said.
In 2023, PPI examined four states and nine cities and counties that had ended cashless bail. They found that every single one of these jurisdictions had "decreases or negligible increases in crime or rearrest rates after implementing reforms."
Many of the other major cities Trump has threatened with a federal military takeover, including Chicago and New York, have experienced massive drops in crime over the past year, contrary to Trump's claims.
Bertram said that in Washington, DC, where Trump has directly ended cashless bail, the program had been "extremely effective."
In 2022, the last year for which data is available, 93% of those released without bail were not rearrested. In 2019, the most recent year with data, 99% of those who were released for violent crimes were not rearrested.
According to its website, the Bail Project has provided free bail to 34,000 people across the country. Despite the lack of financial incentive, in 2024, 95% of its clients still returned to court, and 64% of them had their cases dismissed.
"Absent our intervention," Cherson says, "many of those people would have likely taken a guilty plea just to go home. They would have been overwhelmed by the circumstances that they're in."
"Crime is something that's very complicated," Bertram said. "It's caused by a lot of different things, including a lot of social determinants."
She noted that the Trump administration has instituted dramatic cuts to programs to reduce gun violence, investigate crimes, and provide services to victims, and to "all of the things that we know to be related to the social determinants of crime"—social safety net programs like Medicaid, investments in affordable housing, and services for those dealing with homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues.
Bertram said, "It is a useful distraction from the president's disinvestment in all those things to put this order in place about cash bail as if it's going to make any difference, which it's not."
"All these states, localities, and jurisdictions that have pursued efforts to minimize or eliminate the use of cash bail have done that in service of the core principles of our justice system," Cherson said. "Principles of equity and fairness and safety and the presumption of innocence."
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We Don’t Throw People Away: Why I Support a Harm Reduction Approach in LA
We have a moral responsibility to set an example for the rest of the nation: one that’s rooted in compassion, humanity, and data-driven approaches.
May 07, 2025
If you were drowning, I wouldn’t ask how you got there before throwing you a lifeline.
I wouldn’t tell you to swim harder.
I wouldn’t tell you to make better choices, I wouldn’t hope you sink, and I wouldn’t put you in a cage.
If you were drowning, I would reach for you, pull you up, and do everything in my power to keep you alive.
That’s what harm reduction is: keeping people alive.
We don’t criminalize someone for losing a limb to the effects of diabetes. We don’t arrest them for not taking their insulin or for struggling to manage their blood sugar. We surround them with medical care, support systems, and resources to help them live healthier lives.
The first step isn’t forcing someone into a system they aren’t ready for. The first step is keeping them alive long enough to say yes.
Problematic substance use—a chronic, relapsing disease—is no different. And harm reduction is one of the many courses of medical action we’re taking to address this in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, where the opioid crisis and homelessness collide in painful, visible ways.
I understand the frustration. I hear the anger. Lock them up, people say—oblivious to the harrowing truth that this crisis is made profoundly worse in our jails.
I want a healthy, accessible, thriving MacArthur Park just as much as my neighbors; a MacArthur Park where hardworking families aren’t forced to live amid trauma and visible substance use. But let me be clear: I don’t throw people away—and I don’t invest in failed solutions.
People don’t wake up one day and decide to become homeless or addicted. They end up there because they’ve been failed by an economic system that keeps people in poverty, by a housing system that makes rent impossible to afford, by a criminal justice system that treats problematic substance use like a crime instead of a disease, by a political system that chronically underfunds mental health, and by a for-profit healthcare system that allowed big pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the opioid epidemic and knowingly steal thousands of lives in exchange for billions of dollars.
We’ve spent over a trillion dollars on the failed War on Drugs, and the availability and potency of illicit drugs have only increased—along with our prison population.
It’s time for a different approach.
Decades of research have shown that harm reduction strategies provide significant public health benefits, including preventing deaths from overdoses and preventing transmission of infectious diseases. That’s why our office partnered with the LA County Department of Health Services and Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles (HHCLA) to deploy an overdose response team in the park seven days a week. Every day, they provide wound care, hygiene kits, naloxone, methadone, and harm reduction tools to people experiencing problematic substance use. They clean up biohazardous waste, picking up and safely disposing of left-behind needles and pipes that put our families in danger. They do the work that Recreation and Parks and LAPD can’t while reducing call volume to emergency responders, and we are all safer for it.
Since launching in late 2024, this team has collected over 14,000 hazardous items and distributed more than 3,600 naloxone kits—totaling over 11,000 doses of life-saving medication—and saved 52 lives. Those 52 people have names and faces and stories and hopes and dreams. They are someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone who now has a shot at accepting treatment, because we know that recovery isn’t a straight path—it takes multiple touchpoints. The first step isn’t forcing someone into a system they aren’t ready for. The first step is keeping them alive long enough to say yes.
I also want to be clear about what our office can and cannot do. The City Council cannot make arrests. What we can do is invest in solutions. We can choose to fund the strategies that actually reduce harm, that save lives, that address the root causes of these crises. Or, we can choose to push people out of sight and throw them away.
The fight for humanity goes far beyond MacArthur Park. We see it happening across the country. We see it in how President Donald Trump treats immigrants like pawns, willing to let families suffer for cheap political points. We see it in how he attacks the LGBTQ+ community, stripping away protections and treatment, denying their very existence. We see marginalized communities degraded and vilified and sacrificed at the altar of power, and we see misinformation peddled at every turn to satiate a hungry, desperate base. It is easy to dehumanize. It is easy to discard people. It is easy to think of human lives as inconvenient. But we have to resist that urge. We are better than that in Los Angeles. We have a moral responsibility to set an example for the rest of the nation: one that’s rooted in compassion, humanity, and data-driven approaches. And since my very first day in office, that’s what I’ve always done, no matter how uphill the battle may be.
MacArthur Park is struggling. Yes, we are frustrated, scared, and sometimes, angry. But I refuse to abandon the people suffering in front of us.
We don’t throw people away. We fight for them.
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4/20 Is No Celebration for Thousands—Trump Can Change That
The time for incremental change is over. The cannabis industry is booming, generating billions in revenue and creating jobs. Yet, thousands remain imprisoned for actions that are now considered perfectly legal.
Apr 20, 2025
Across the country, cannabis users today will celebrate 4/20, a day synonymous with the plant's consumption and a symbol of its growing acceptance.
But for thousands of people still incarcerated for cannabis-related offenses, 4/20 is not a day of celebration; it’s a reminder of an unjust system that has yet to make amends.
The legal landscape around cannabis has evolved dramatically. Forty-one states now have some form of legal cannabis. Cannabis companies are going public on Wall Street, dispensaries are opening in high-end shopping districts, and tax revenues from legal sales are funding schools and infrastructure.
Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people remain imprisoned for the very substance that is now a billion-dollar industry. Millions of individuals are also still coping with the life-long burden of having a cannabis conviction on their record.
This is a moral and economic outrage that demands an immediate solution.
President Donal Trump and his administration have a chance to go further than President Joe Biden ever did on cannabis by pardoning every individual imprisoned for cannabis at the federal level.
That’s not as unlikely as some might think.
On the campaign trail, Trump said he was starting to “agree a lot more” that individuals should not be criminalized for cannabis when it’s being legalized across the country. He even posted, “I believe it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use.”
In his first term, President Trump commuted the sentences of 16 people and pardoned 6 individuals for cannabis offenses. He also championed the bipartisan sentencing reform bill, the First Step Act, which was designed to promote rehabilitation, lower recidivism, and reduce excessive sentences for certain federal drug offenses.
He’s not alone in his administration. J.D. Vance told Joe Rogan that his overall philosophy on marijuana and psychedelics is to “live and let live,” and reaffirmed that he feels people should not be criminalized over cannabis. Elon Musk, the de facto head of DOGE, famously smoked a blunt on Rogan’s podcast.
Clemency isn’t the only place where President Trump can go further than his predecessor. He could also significantly boost America's budding cannabis industry by rescheduling cannabis. This would both reduce tax burdens and help the United States tap into an industry projected to reach over $100 billion by 2030, while also easing the burden on law enforcement and the judicial system.
Rescheduling is also an opportunity for Trump to deliver for Black and Brown communities, who suffer the most from outdated cannabis policies and supported the president in record numbers in 2024. On average, Black individuals are more than three times more likely than white Americans to be arrested for cannabis despite similar consumption rates. President Trump can help right an injustice that has gone on far too long.
Both granting clemency for people convicted of cannabis-related crimes and rescheduling cannabis would be immensely popular decisions for President Trump. A YouGov poll found that 70 percent of Americans support clearing criminal records for past non-violent marijuana-related convictions. According to an American Civil Liberties Union poll, 84% of registered voters support the release of people serving time for crimes that are no longer considered illegal.
Only one in 10 Americans believe marijuana should not be legal at all, according to the Pew Research Center.
The time for incremental change is over. The cannabis industry is booming, generating billions in revenue and creating jobs. Yet, thousands remain imprisoned for actions that are now considered perfectly legal.
This is a moral and economic outrage that demands an immediate solution. President Trump has a penchant for bold action and the power to turn 4/20 into a day for real celebration through cannabis clemency and rescheduling.
He should seize this moment and right the wrongs that every president this century has kicked down the road.
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No, Progressives Didn’t Ruin Cities Like San Francisco
Locally and nationally, the City by the Bay is being weaponized like a two-pronged pitchfork aimed simultaneously at erasing local progressive change and mobilizing Republican voters motivated by anti-urban fear.
Feb 25, 2024
Despite the apocalyptic stories you may have heard from Fox News, the New York Post, CNN, and other outlets, San Francisco, California, remains an epically beautiful, achingly poetic, richly diverse, and uniquely important American city. This “cool, grey city of love,” as poet George Sterling coined it back in 1892, has long been a haven for progressive ideas, groundbreaking literature and art, and enlightened social justice.
The City by the Bay has been a national leader on living wages, universal healthcare, criminal justice reform (until recently), and LGBTQ+ rights. But the city has a lesser-known conservative streak that is now mightily resurgent, as deep-pocketed reactionary political forces aim to overhaul San Francisco politics by weaponizing homelessness, drug addiction, and crime to fuel election-year fearmongering about urban crisis.
Progressivism is under siege in this historically forward-looking town that has blazed trails for same-sex marriage, tenants’ rights, immigrant protections, and more. A center-right reactionary movement—financed by Republican billionaires, wealthy corporate Democrats, and big business interests—is pushing hard to take over city politics and roll back progressive policies on everything from homelessness to crime and policing, housing, and elections. It’s a remarkable political volte-face that gained national attention with the 2022 recall of progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin.
The city’s famously pretty and increasingly gritty streets—which, like all cities, are tragically sites of chronic homelessness, virally publicized crimes, and fentanyl fatalities—are now a flashpoint for a conservative narrative on rampant homelessness, crime, and punishment.
While moderate and conservative forces have always existed in San Francisco, the current insurgency surfaced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Frustrated by lengthy school closures and the perception of crime run amok (even though most violent crime rates remained lower than most American cities), the center-right coalition funded and fomented a reactionary rebellion, recalling three progressive school board members and then Boudin. Building on these wins, these groups ran hard and spent big to defeat two progressive candidates last year, splurged on campaigns to upend judges, pushed for local legislative districts to favor moderates, and are gunning for more in upcoming elections in March and November. Famously, tech billionaire Elon Musk proclaimed he would chip in $100,000 to defeat Democratic Socialist supervisor Dean Preston; a week later, Musk insisted Preston “should go to prison” for his progressive positions.
This agenda, promoted through ballot initiatives and candidate campaigns as well as advertising and media, includes expanding policing, arresting both drug dealers and users, rolling back criminal justice reforms, building more market-rate housing despite the city’s affordability crisis, and eroding both police accountability and the environmental review of development projects.
The city’s famously pretty and increasingly gritty streets—which, like all cities, are tragically sites of chronic homelessness, virally publicized crimes, and fentanyl fatalities—are now a flashpoint for a conservative narrative on rampant homelessness, crime, and punishment.
Blaming the left for San Francisco’s struggles—which are in fact common to most big cities in America, and to many rural areas as well—is a prime talking point among right-wing and mainstream media, as well as Republican candidates for president. In a Fox News debate last November with California’s Democratic Governor (and former San Francisco mayor) Gavin Newsom, Florida governor and former Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis held up a “poop map,” allegedly showing the proliferation of human feces on San Francisco streets. After a 20-minute pit stop in the city, DeSantis featured San Francisco in a lurid and sensational campaign ad blaming “leftist policies” for the strife in the streets. The day after President Joe Biden announced his 2024 candidacy for re-election, the Republican Party spat out a “what if” campaign commercial featuring apocalyptic AI-generated imagery of San Francisco’s streets overrun with crime and drugs.
Locally and nationally, San Francisco is being weaponized like a two-pronged pitchfork aimed simultaneously at erasing local progressive change and mobilizing Republican voters motivated by anti-urban fear. These two prongs, the local centrist and the national right-wing, are at once distinct but mutually reinforcing.
At a public safety forum last December, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins told a televised audience that homeless people “have to be made to be uncomfortable.” This stunningly Orwellian moment merits repetition: A high-level elected official in one of America’s allegedly more progressive cities insists that people living on the streets need to be made uncomfortable, as if barely surviving without a home isn’t hard enough.
The GOP’s war on cities isn’t just for votes, it’s also a lunge for political control—even when it means diminishing local control, a longstanding Republican mantra.
Jenkins’ bizarre remarks echoed Mayor London Breed’s oxymoronic declaration a few months earlier, at a chaotic outdoor city supervisors meeting near a block known for intense drug dealing, that “compassion is killing people.” Wait—what? Compassion is what’s killing people, not poverty, trauma, abuse, inequality, and nationwide shortages of affordable housing and treatment facilities? The mayor’s remark crystallizes the reactionary thinking ascendant in San Francisco—a deeply conservative politics that blames “compassionate” policies rather than addressing the region’s and the nation’s epic inequalities and decades of declining public investments in affordable housing and treatment for both mental health and substance addiction.
Now, borrowing from the Republican playbook amid her re-election bid this year, Breed is pushing a ballot measure that would require drug testing for recipients of county general assistance—a basic financial lifeline—despite widespread evidence that the approach doesn’t work and often discourages people from getting this meager assistance that helps sustain the poorest of the poor.
Over the past year, Breed, Newsom, conservatives, and moderates alike have prioritized reviving police “sweeps” to remove homeless people from tent settlements on sidewalks—despite chronic shortages of shelter and drug treatment beds and supportive housing, and despite court rulings against criminalizing homeless people for sleeping on sidewalks when there are no clear alternatives. In August, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed the ban on sweeps, angry protesters—joined by Breed and some city legislators—came to the courthouse to voice their outrage that police are not allowed to sweep away homeless people from city sidewalks. (Somehow, these rulings didn’t prevent Breed and police from forcibly removing homeless people from downtown areas during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.)
In his deeply problematic 2021 book, San Fransicko, author Michael Shellenberger wrote, “Progressives ruin cities,” but there’s one big problem with this view: It is profoundly, empirically wrong. Worse, it is fueling a style of politics based on fearmongering and scapegoating that conveniently distracts from tackling the economic and social chasms propelling these crises.
Fearmongering about urban crises has been standard Republican fare for decades, most famously in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, which established the template for making crime, “law and order,” and images of urban chaos a key strategy for winning white suburban and rural votes.
At a campaign stop in Bakersfield, California, in 2020, Donald Trump railed, “Look what’s happened to San Francisco, so sad what’s happened when you see a slum. It’s worse than a slum, there’s no slum like that.” He lost.
In 2022, Republican Darren Bailey ran a heavily anti-urban campaign for Illinois governor, calling Chicago a “crime-ridden, corrupt, dysfunctional hellhole.” He, too, lost.
Along with San Francisco, New York City is a prime target of this narrative. But as Newsweek found, crime rates in many Republican-led cities, such as Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Miami, Florida, are higher than in the Big Apple.
At the Republican state convention in North Carolina in 2021, Trump railed against Democratic-led cities that “defunded” police, echoing police groups’ claims that staffing reductions led to crime spikes. While some violent crimes rose, most cities trimmed police budgets barely, if at all, and crime rose in places that increased police spending as well as those that cut it, according to a report in The Tennessean.
The city’s chronic homelessness and drug addiction in the streets are rooted in astronomic housing prices, and structural regional and national inequality, exacerbated and enabled by public disinvestments in affordable housing and treatment for mental health and substance abuse.
Now, in a particularly cynical move, Republicans are shipping immigrants to Democratic-led big cities. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida’s DeSantis are flying and busing undocumented immigrants to cities such as Chicago, Denver, and New York City, an election-year strategy to rid their states of mostly brown asylum-seekers while adding fiscal and political pressures on Democratic-led urban areas. In response, Democratic mayors have expanded shelters for immigrants and are pressing Biden to bolster federal resources to address people’s needs.
The GOP’s war on cities isn’t just for votes, it’s also a lunge for political control—even when it means diminishing local control, a longstanding Republican mantra. As Mother Jones reported, Republican legislatures and governors “are moving to curb the power of blue municipalities and other institutions that don’t fall in line; erase the voting power of non-Republicans; expel the people those communities elected; and strip them of redress.” This “war on local control” includes challenging the powers of public school systems, district attorneys, and ballot initiatives. Plus, recall efforts are increasing nationwide.
While the Republican “culture wars” don’t resonate in San Francisco, local centrist groups speak a similar GOP-like language on crime, homelessness, and addiction in the streets. The difference is that they articulate it in a locally palatable, seemingly moderate dialect.
As one longtime city resident and observer of San Francisco politics commented on X (formerly Twitter): “The SF Tech-Finance Republican platform that is exactly the same as the ‘moderate Democrat’ one: Criminalize poverty; cops and more cops; deregulate government oversight commissions; deregulate real estate; racist school segregation; deregulation and tax cut[s] for business.”
The financial interests behind San Francisco's reactionary movement were primary funders of the school board and Boudin recalls, and continue to flood the city’s politics with cash. In one example, just two tech industry entrepreneurs spent $350,000 to boost the mayor’s ballot measure to expand policing.
This well-financed octopus of center-right political groups, many with quite similar names (GrowSF, Advance SF, TogetherSF, and Neighbors for a Better SF, among others) features overlapping funders and political ties, local researchers Nate Horrell and Lisa Awbrey have documented.
Shellenberger, who has also written a climate-denial book and espouses troubling transphobic beliefs, is a key figure. His group, Environmental Progress, funds a host of local advocates who promote various planks of the reactionary agenda, from criminalizing drug users and homeless people to expanding policing and incarceration.
Another top funder is Michael Moritz, a knighted Welsh billionaire who got phenomenally rich as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Moritz funds both The San Francisco Standard online publication and political groups like Neighbors for a Better SF and TogetherSF. Moritz has plowed a stunning $336 million into San Francisco “social and political causes” over the past three years.
Other players include the conservative Manhattan Institute and one of its leading ideologues, Christopher Rufo, who produced a slick, heart-tugging, yet deeply misleading video about San Francisco’s struggles, titled “Chaos by the Bay,” which has netted nearly 2 million views on YouTube alone.
While progressive policies have clearly not fixed the crises in the streets, they have reduced the harm and suffering.
According to Tim Redmond, editor of the local news outlet 48 Hills, this reactionary movement is “driven by a false media narrative” that “suggests San Francisco is crime-ridden and unsafe, and that the solution is more police and more incarceration.” Redmond, who has covered city politics since 1986, adds, “It’s funded by very, very rich Big Tech and real estate folks who are, frankly, taking advantage of a situation where the voters are unhappy to try to impose a neoliberal agenda.”
The thing is, they’re wrong about San Francisco and the causes of its problems. The city’s chronic homelessness and drug addiction in the streets are rooted in astronomic housing prices, and structural regional and national inequality, exacerbated and enabled by public disinvestments in affordable housing and treatment for mental health and substance abuse. Decades of citywide gentrification—and a seismic economic and political shift propelled by the tech and real estate industries—spawned thousands of evictions, even from subsidized housing; meanwhile, 71% of homeless people in the city were formerly housed here, city officials report. A recent peer-reviewed, multi-university study on homelessness in California found that high rents and housing instability are top drivers of the state’s soaring homelessness.
A key character in this story is the tech industry, which has dominated the local and regional landscape for the past quarter-century. This inequitable economic monocropping has produced the world’s greatest concentration of billionaires, alongside California’s most glaring inequality, with the top 10% raking in more than 12 times what those in the bottom 10% make. This, combined with stratospheric housing prices, has fomented a mass exodus of poor and working-class people from the city.
Combine these local and regional factors with a national affordable housing shortage, and nearly half the nation at poverty's precipice, and you have a volatile recipe for homelessness and desperation. Homelessness jumped by record levels in 2023, due to the dearth of affordable housing and stark drops in post-pandemic public assistance. And now, Republicans are trying to eliminate or cut welfare and food stamps.
The suffering on some San Francisco streets, and those of other American cities and towns, is horrifically real. But as long as these reactionary movements blame false causes, while distracting from these huge structural culprits, the suffering—and those reactionary howls for yet more policing and punishment—will only get worse.
While progressive policies have clearly not fixed the crises in the streets, they have reduced the harm and suffering. A harm-reduction center for drug users that Breed first opened and then shut down saved hundreds of lives by preventing overdose deaths, which have spiked since its closure.
Progressive ballot measures in recent years that tax the rich to expand supportive housing and services for homeless people have housed thousands. Progressive policies preventing tenant evictions have helped keep many residents housed who might otherwise have ended up on the streets.
Other progressive policies have substantially improved San Franciscans’ lives: a living wage ordinance; an anti-wage-theft ordinance; universal local healthcare; free public transit for children; and a tax on the city’s wealthiest property owners to fund rental assistance and more affordable housing.
What San Francisco needs is not more punishment, nor more slashing of public aid, nor a new “just say no” war on drugs. Our best hope is to greatly expand and fund policies known to help: more affordable and supportive housing, combined with more treatment for addiction and mental illness; living wages so people can afford that housing; and a New Deal for homeless and poor people that engages, employs, houses, supports, inspires, and includes these people rather than weaponizing them for political gain.
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Federal Court Strikes Down Mississippi's 'Jim Crow' Felon Disenfranchisement Law
"Mississippi stands as an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear national trend in our nation against permanent disenfranchisement."
Aug 04, 2023
A U.S. federal appellate court on Friday ruled that a Jim Crow-era Mississippi law permanently disenfranchising people with certain felony convictions is unconstitutional.
In a decision that can be appealed to the full U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel of the tribunal ruled 2-1 that Section 241 of Mississippi's 1890 Constitution "violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law."
Last August, the 5th Circuit affirmed Section 241 ,with dissenting Judge James E. Graves Jr., a Black Mississippian, lamenting that when his colleagues were "handed an opportunity to right a 130-year-old wrong, the majority instead upholds it."
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the ruling, prompting a scathing dissent from liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
"In the last 50 years, a national consensus has emerged among the state legislatures against permanently disenfranchising those who have satisfied their judicially imposed sentences and thus repaid their debts to society," Friday's ruling states. "Mississippi stands as an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear national trend in our nation against permanent disenfranchisement."
Friday's ruling is the result of a 2018 lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and ACLU on behalf of plaintiffs including Dennis Hopkins, who has been disenfranchised since 1998 due to a grand larceny conviction.
"In school, they teach our kids that everybody's vote counts, but no matter how I've lived for the past 20 years, I don't count, not my values or my experience," Hopkins said when the suit was filed. "I have paid Mississippi what I owe it in full, but I still can't cast my vote for my children's future."
Section 241 "mandates permanent, lifetime disenfranchisement of a person convicted of a crime of any one of 'murder, rape, bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, or bigamy,'" according to the ruling.
As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) notes, "Section 241 permanently disenfranchises people convicted of 10 specific crimes, eight of which were chosen by all-white delegates in 1890 and based on their belief that Black people were more likely than white people to be convicted of those crimes."
There are currently more than 20 crimes that disenfranchise Mississippians from voting. The state—which according to the Sentencing Project is one of only 12 with lifetime disenfranchisement—added 11 more offenses to the ban list in 2005.
In contrast, everyone age 18 and up—including currently incarcerated individuals—has the right to vote in Maine and Vermont.
While Black Mississippians are 36% of Mississippi's voting-age population, they make up 59% of its disenfranchised people.
"Section 241 is Jim Crow law, which created a deliberate and invidious scheme to disenfranchise Black people," said LDF assistant counsel Patricia Okonta.
"Today, Black Mississippians continue to be disproportionately harmed by this provision," Okonta added. "While the state is home to the highest percentage of Black Americans of any state in the country, it has not elected a Black person to statewide office since 1890."
According to the Felony Murder Elimination Project, a California-based advocacy group:
Over 215,000 people in Mississippi were disenfranchised as of 2019, representing almost 10% of the entire state population. Of this total, only 7% are incarcerated. The remaining 93% are living in the community either under probation or parole supervision, or have completed their criminal sentence. The number of African American residents disenfranchised in Mississippi numbered 127,130 in 2016 or nearly 16% of the Black electorate.
"No one disputes that Mississippi's felon disenfranchisement law was enacted more than 100 years ago for the announced purpose of maintaining white supremacy and blocking Black citizens from voting," ACLU national legal director David Cole said in a statement.
"Racially motivated laws don't become valid over time," Cole added. "It's just as unconstitutional today as it was when it was enacted. That such a law remains on the books today is a stain on the state's law books, and plainly unconstitutional."
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What Would Statehood Mean for Puerto Rico’s Criminal Justice Reforms?
If Puerto Rico is being boxed into statehood, will Congress commit in writing not to infringe on the progressive values and practices long established in Puerto Rico’s constitution and laws?
Jul 28, 2023
In a matter of a year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned decades of precedents and critical policies that took years of blood, sweat, and tears to build momentum for. The right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies during pregnancy, the use of race as a factor in college admissions despite the value of diversity in educational settings, the establishment of a constitutional right for businesses open to the public to deny service to protected classes.
In the criminal justice context, this ultra-conservative judicial activism continues to roll back basic protections under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. Indeed, just years ago Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised a clarion call against the court’s allowance of an unconstitutional detention by police to be justified, after-the-fact, by the existence of an outstanding warrant—something no police officer can determine by simply looking at you, unless, presumably, you’re Black or Latinx.
And this simply summarizes what the judiciary alone has done. Congress is constantly entertaining ways to limit the rights of the accused in this country.
The details of what the United States will commit to—or not—when it comes to this politically expedient push for statehood matter.
Why do rollbacks like these matter for Puerto Rico when Congress is considering status options that include statehood?
Amid some leaders urging that Puerto Rico be leaned on to become a U.S. state and that this can somehow magically solve the problems that Americans created over centuries, Puerto Ricans should be asking tough questions about the implications of annexation, or statehood.
I am a son of Puerto Rico. I am also the former president and general counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, formerly the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. I’ve defended civil rights, racial justice, and the right of Puerto Ricans to fair self-determination for my entire career. The pro-statehood messaging around Puerto Rico’s future fails to address the fact that the ways Puerto Rico and the U.S. operate in many spaces are dramatically different.
Puerto Rico is clearly confronting a web of issues stemming from U.S. colonialism. But as history and practice show, the Puerto Rican people have been leaders in spaces like criminal justice.
Since 1980, Puerto Ricans who are incarcerated are allowed to vote and they avidly exercise that right from their prison cells. With over 6,500 of 11,500 prisoners registered to vote in Puerto Rican elections, candidates campaign for their votes in a Caribbean archipelago where democracy is not eliminated through incarceration.
In Puerto Rico, capital punishment was abolished in 1929 and enshrined in its first-ever constitution in 1952. History tells us that the first persons ever executed by the government were enslaved Africans in 1514—killed for leading an uprising. But that is no more, as the command that “The death penalty shall not exist” is the law.
Puerto Rico also has a constitutional right to bail. Since its constitution of 1952 the protection is clear: “Every accused shall be entitled to be admitted to bail.” Apparently, it is the only place in the Western Hemisphere that establishes a fundamental right to bail in all cases. Even fear-mongering by its opponents has been rejected by the public as recently as 2012 and previously in 1994.
In part, Puerto Rico’s traditions stand in contrast to those of most states because it patterned its own Bill of Rights not after the U.S. Bill of Rights but after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Predictably, given its colonial status, these policies create tension with the colonizer especially given where Puerto Rico stands on capital punishment, which the federal government insists has no bearing on it seeking the death penalty in Puerto Rico’s federal courts. This big footing is part and parcel of colonial dominance since 1898, with this year marking the 125th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico.
Now, this is not to say that there are not severe systemic racial and criminal justice problems in Puerto Rico, where the police department has a federal monitor, deservedly, where a femicide crisis and violence against transgender residents have no end in sight, and where prison conditions are deplorable.
But if Puerto Rico is being boxed into statehood, will Congress commit in writing not to infringe on the progressive values and practices long established in Puerto Rico’s constitution and laws? Will Members of Congress deny the right-wing forces in the island that would be willing to sacrifice these legal protections in exchange for statehood?
Currently, the Puerto Rico Status Act (PRSA) is being pushed in Congress as a remedy to its colonial status. Consider history in a Caribbean country where the legislature, government agencies, schools, and courts—and all those who come before them—conduct business in Spanish, 24/7. Prior to Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and other states being tracked into the union, Congress included English language requirements in the enabling acts they passed. The U.S. immediately imposed an Americanization policy in the early 1900s to force Puerto Rican schools to teach in English—after decades of disaster and failure Puerto Rico finally restored Spanish as the medium of instruction. Yet the PRSA dodges what Puerto Ricans would be subjected to in crucial matters like language, criminal justice, and taxes.
As a lawyer and as someone deeply concerned about the present and future of Puerto Rico, it’s a big red flag when major issues like these are left out of the conversation and not clearly stated. And I must ask why? And who does this serve? Because it’s not Puerto Ricans, justice, or human rights.
While we witnessed the Supreme Court roll over hard-fought battles to extend “America’s promise,” we were reminded that nothing can be taken for granted. The details of what the United States will commit to—or not—when it comes to this politically expedient push for statehood matter. Puerto Ricans, here and there, need to take heed and demand answers, not the void that this legislation offers.
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American Childrearing: Punish, Terrify, and Purify
The actions of a police couple who jailed their 3-year-old son for pooping his pants speak to a larger national context that places cops in schools.
Jul 07, 2023
A tiny piece of news out of Florida the other day poked me, you might say, in the rear end. The nation’s prison population—we’re number one!—expanded slightly, as did the concept of crime itself.
A couple in Daytona Beach, Florida—two police officers—put their 3-year-old son in jail two days in a row, handcuffing him, letting him sit in the cell wailing, because he...
Pooped in his pants.
This is how you get kids to grow up properly. Spare the handcuffs, spoil the child.
This was how they were conducting potty training. I kid you not. And it worked, according to Dad, who told a social worker looking into the matter that the toddler has promised he won’t do it again—problem solved! The couple apparently faces an investigation for their actions by their department, but remained adamant, according to The Washington Post, that they had done nothing wrong. This is how you get kids to grow up properly. Spare the handcuffs, spoil the child.
Yeah, some shocking nonsense, right? But as I read about the incident, I felt a deep murmur of smug certainty resonating off in the distance somewhere. The couple’s strange attitude felt, shall we say, American—the reduction of life to the simple and linear: right vs. wrong. No psychological, social, or spiritual complexity here, folks. Just punish, terrify, and purify.
The reason I’m writing about it isn’t to castigate this particular couple but, rather, to look at the larger context in which their attitude toward parenting fits. Kids in jail aren’t exactly a rare phenomenon. The legal bureaucracy that runs this country is pretty simple-minded. Consider, for instance, the militarization of the nation’s public schools, via the placement of school resource officers—cops—in the hallways, walking around, looking for trouble, keeping order.
The nation’s schools are “over-criminalized and under-resourced,” according to a report in Chicago Policy Review, which points out that U.S. schools “overwhelmingly have more police on hand than support staff to deal with students’ behavior issues.” This means, as of a few years ago, according to ACLU statistics, that some 3 million students attend schools that have police officers but no nurses; 1.7 million students attend schools with police but no counselors. The stats go on and on. Ten million students have no social workers at their school, but they have, you guessed it, police.
And this, of course, means that “disciplining” students often amounts to arresting them, not looking with any depth of understanding into their behavior. As far as I’m concerned, this national attitude is precisely as stupid and simplistic as that shown by the police parents who tossed their 3-year-old into jail for going in his pants rather than the toilet. The attitude that makes such an educational structure possible is totally reductionist: Children who misbehave must be punished. It’s called tit for tat. There is no other option. And it goes on their permanent record. Any questions?
If there are consequences for the arrested child in later life, that’s something for the future to worry about. And Black kids are more likely to be arrested than white kids? Go ahead and complain if you want—call it racism—it’s not our concern.
And then there’s this basic fact. Police have far less basic training for what they do than teachers, counselors, psychologists—people whose work actually penetrates the complexity of human life. I say this not to disparage policing, but to note the disrespect with which the legal system itself holds police work. In point of fact, maintaining order requires more than a badge, a gun, and a pair of handcuffs. It requires both a depth of human understanding and access to options other than arrest and jail cells.
When a child—when anyone—is arrested, he or she is instantly shoved into isolation, separated from the rest of the community. He’s disconnected from the rest of the world. Indeed, the American prison structure seems to be completely focused on the maintenance of criminal isolation, perhaps for the arrestee’s entire life, which guarantees our society an ongoing presence of domestic enemies.
In contrast, as Fania Davis wrote in Yes! Magazine: “a student’s sense of belonging to a high school community is a top protective factor against violence and incarceration.”
Davis, a civil rights attorney, is co-founder of an organization called Restorative Justice for Oakland (California) Youth. And her essay in Yes! told the story of a local school conflict—a 14-year-old boy, chastised for falling asleep at this desk, began cursing at his teacher, took a swing at a counselor who intervened, and could easily... oh, so easily... have been expelled, arrested, tossed into the social trash bin.
What happened instead, however, was the opposite of that. And no, it didn’t happen with the immediacy of a police intervention. The school had a Restorative Justice coordinator, a process I’ve been writing about for years and believe in with the fullness of my being. It’s not about punishment. It’s about healing. And it’s a long, deeply complex process, involving all concerned—those who caused harm, those who were affected by it—speaking their truth and listening to one another from the heart.
The Restorative Justice coordinator managed to calm the boy down enough so that, as they walked into the coordinator’s office, he told the story of his day, which involved a missing, drug-addicted mother and two younger siblings for whom he prepared breakfast. Eventually, those involved in the brouhaha—including the teacher, the principal, and the boy’s mother (eventually tracked down by the coordinator)—sat together in a peace circle, told their stories in full detail, and listened to one another.
This was, of course, a lengthy process, requiring an enormous effort by the Restorative Justice coordinator, but what flowed out of it was awe and understanding. As Davis wrote, the principal later exclaimed: “We were about to put this kid out of school, when what he really deserved was a medal.”
This is called “a feeling of belonging.” And the feeling involves all concerned.
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How a Climate of Fear Makes Us Less Safe
The right-wing paranoia-propaganda machine scares people into answering their doorbells with guns drawn.
Apr 28, 2023
A teenage boy rings the wrong doorbell and is shot in the face. A 20-year-old woman is fatally shot when she and her friends pull into the wrong driveway. Two cheerleaders are shot when one accidentally gets into the wrong car. And a six-year-old is shot when kids chase a basketball into a neighbor's yard.
These tragic events seem incomprehensible. But we got a glimpse of an underlying reason for at least one of them, the wrong-doorbell shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl. According to his grandson, the 84-year-old shooter watched a steady diet of Fox News and OAN. He was immersed in a "24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia."
Sadly, far-right politicians and media figures have habitually stoked fear and manufactured moral panics as a political strategy to amp up their base. And it's having an effect: For decades, Gallup polls have consistently found that Americans believe crime is going up, whether it is or not.
The cost of this paranoia-propaganda machine? Real human lives.
The cost of this paranoia-propaganda machine? Real human lives—and poor policy choices that continue to make America an unnecessarily dangerous place to live.
Fear boosts TV ratings for Fox News and clicks for right-wing websites. It elects "tough on crime" politicians, sells guns, and contributes to the proliferation of "stand your ground" and permissive concealed-carry laws. Violent media scares people into answering their doorbells with guns drawn.
None of these things enhances safety.
Contrary to what the gun lobby says, more guns do not keep people and communities safer. Nearly 30 studies rounded up by Scientific American have linked more guns to more crime—not less. Another recent study shows murder rates are much higher in "tough on crime" red states than "soft on crime" blue states. That's been true every year since 2000.
Evidence keeps piling up that dire warnings and more guns don't make Americans safer. What compounds the disaster is that this rhetoric continues to be weaponized against reforms that actually could save lives.
That's one reason we've been unable to move quickly on police and criminal justice reform—even as civil rights advocates call for changes like deploying alternative first responders to reduce the risk of nonviolent 911 calls, like welfare checks or mental health crises, from turning deadly.
The same fear that makes people believe they need to arm themselves also makes them believe that cities need hugely inflated police budgets. There's scaremongering aimed at reform-minded district attorneys, despite evidence that progressive reforms don't increase crime in general or violent crime in particular. The same attacks are aimed at mayors and legislators who want to make changes to policing.
I know—I experienced this first-hand.
When I was mayor of Ithaca, New York, we got much tougher about screening police applicants. Our city council approved a complete overhaul of our police department to prioritize unarmed responses. And the city halted no-knock warrants for suspected drug crimes.
I was routinely called "anti-police" by the far-right wing. But we forged ahead with our forward-thinking approach to public safety and crime remained low—often dramatically lower than in other cities our size.
The recent rash of shootings are horrific at an individual level. At the social level, a critical lesson here is that a climate of fear—and those who benefit politically or financially from it—gives us bad laws, bad politics, and bad behavior that endanger us all.
It's time for that to stop. It's time to turn away from the fearmongers and toward solutions that work.
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What Business Do Former CIA Agents Have in Domestic Law Enforcement?
Behind all the law enforcement mumbo-jumbo is a commitment to racist broken-windows policing.
Mar 24, 2023
This exercise of fitting a square into a circular peg is precisely what now guides New Jersey’s contemporary policing regime. The Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC), the only Department of Homeland Security-affiliated fusion center within the Garden State is led by a former CIA agent trained in international espionage, not state and municipal law enforcement tactics that must adhere to constitutional rights. As New Jersey's experience makes clear, the way fusion centers operate render them rife for abuse, and offer outdated models of policing.
The Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights’ (CSRR) recent report Shining a Light on New Jersey’s Secret Intelligence System shows how the ROIC wastes limited state resources doubling down on “broken windows policing” – a method consistently rebuked by legal and criminal justice scholars as a tool of mass incarceration. Broken windows models emphasize aggressive enforcement of misdemeanor and non-violent “quality of life” offenses. ROIC intelligence gathering focuses on these methods, as the example of the City of Camden attests. There, ROIC intelligence has given rise to open season on privacy and petty offenses, with police issuing fines for offenses like riding a bicycle without a bell. Invariably, such tactics overwhelmingly target minority communities. Rather than fight terrorism, ROIC intelligence furthers the overreach of the carceral state with little benefit.
This misalignment of input and outcome is not innocuous, but by design. The architecture of the ROIC is not vested in proven or progressive policing, but by the methods native to global spy networks. Indeed, the last two directors of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, the body overseeing the ROIC, are former CIA agents.
Over the past six months, CSRR has sought accountability for the ROIC’s overreach, by filing several dozen Open Records Act (OPRA) requests into the ROIC’s relationship with county and state law enforcement agencies. Regrettably, those requests were almost summarily stonewalled, allowing the ROIC and its partners to operate in an accountability-free zone.
Shining a Light on New Jersey’s Secret Intelligence System exposes the extent of secrecy shrouding the ROIC and expansively documents those efforts. The report highlights the lack of transparency, the legal regimes that allow agencies to push back against basic public information requests, and the general apparatus that promotes this wall of secrecy.
Like with so many fusion centers across the country, the ROIC is engaging in mission creep far from its original purpose of fighting terrorism by over-policing non-violent crimes and justifying its budget behind closed-off series of feedback loops.
Open-source research shows the ROIC operating in ways banal and embarrassing – and less than strictly observant of civil liberties and civil rights. But even the most basic questions surrounding the ROIC’s budget and role in local and state information-sharing and structure are routinely ignored by various local, state, and county law enforcement agencies.
Responses from law enforcement to basic questions we posed could have provided an opportunity for public discourse on ROIC’s role, policies, and costs. Instead, CSRR received opaque responses, Kafkaesque riddles, and flimsy legal arguments. New Jersey's law enforcement agencies collectively flouted transparency duties under state open records law with only one law enforcement agency providing one substantive response to exactly one request.
The litany of unpersuasive rejections may have varied in form but the results were the same: obstructive and non-transparent. In one combination of denials, agencies would offer to provide some requested information for an exorbitant sum of money while denying the rest.
The underlying theme put forth was an adherence to a regime of secrecy to protect law enforcement’s long-standing preference of substantially operating in the dark. Law enforcement agencies’ lawyers, across the state, using substantially similar language from various jurisdictions, rely on understandings of case law that, divorced of all the typical chicanery, allows the government to deny a request because the person or group making the request has asked for: (1) something that is too specific; and/or (2) not specific enough.
The irony, of course, is that the purpose of an OPRA request is to shine light into hidden troves being kept from citizens. To pinpoint a specific detailed description of a document when the government entity claiming the exemptions continues to hide behind the same wall of secrecy that gives rise to the request flies in the face of the object and purpose of the OPRA statute.
For example, to date, and despite multiple rounds of open records requests, CSRR could not get a clear answer on what the ROIC budget is, what its basic structure looks like, and what mechanisms are in place to protect civil rights and civil liberties.
This kind of secrecy is precisely what empowers the ROIC’s insidious commitment to broken windows policing. The ROIC serves as what Professor Brendan McQuade describes as an “outsourced intelligence division” for local police departments. Rather than meaningfully contributing to policing, the ROIC’s major efforts are instead aimed at “information sharing” and the creation and provision of “higher level intelligence products” like crime mapping, data on so-called “hot spots,” and predictive analyses.
This sort of language is anodyne and important-sounding but little more than the jargon of spy craft let loose on historically hollowed-out communities of color. Behind all the law enforcement mumbo-jumbo is a commitment to racist broken-windows policing.
New Jersey’s laws meant to ensure that state agencies can be held accountable to the public are failing. It is thus long overdue for the New Jersey legislature to engage in robust oversight of the state’s fusion center – and to reformulate the basic OPRA law at a statutory level to undo years of bad, anti-transparency activist precedent. Otherwise, New Jersey’s Secret Surveillance System will continue to operate with no regard, much less accountability, for civil liberties violations.
The full report, titled "Shining a Light on New Jersey’s Secret Intelligence System," can be downloaded here.Keep ReadingShow Less
Decades After False Convictions, 'When They See Us' Highlights Media Failure
While the highly publicized antics of Donald Trump has received a great deal of condemnation, less attention has been paid to how prominent media outlets fell in lockstep with the myth of five deranged black youths randomly attacking white cyclists and joggers in Central Park
Jun 09, 2019
When They See Us, Ava DuVernay's harrowing retelling for Netflix of the false conviction of the five New York youths who became nationally known as the Central Park Five, has reignited discussions about race, stereotypes and how America's penal system has historically brutalized black people under the banner of "criminal justice."
Yet this conversation would be incomplete without a serious reckoning with corporate media's role in fanning the flames of racist hysteria and misinformation, which condemned these innocent youth--Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise--as guilty in the court of public opinion long before the official verdict was handed down. "The press response to this, and the press failure around this case, is something really important to interrogate," DuVernay told The Root (5/28/19).
While the highly publicized antics of Donald Trump and the coldhearted manipulation of lead investigator Linda Fairstein have received a great deal of condemnation, less attention has been paid to how prominent media outlets, like the New York Times and the New York Daily News, fell in lockstep with the myth of five deranged black youths randomly attacking white cyclists and joggers in Central Park.
Take, for example, a Times article written by David E. Pitt (4/25/89). Under the headline "Gang Attack: Unusual for Its Viciousness," Pitt indulged all of the now disproven cliches that accompanied the public vilification of the five young men, including the media buzzword of "wilding" and the reference to the brutal rape of Trisha Meilia--in a phrase borrowed from New York prosecutor Peter Reinharz--as a "wolf-pack attack."
Aside from disregarding the elementary fact that it had yet to be established that the rape was carried out by more than one person (DNA testing later found evidence of only one rapist), the use of the "wolf pack" label to describe a rape allegedly carried out by black youth was disturbingly consistent with the general trend of dehumanization that prevailed in mainstream discussion of the five defendants.
Some of the most flagrant examples of this brand of dehumanization occurred in the pages of the Daily News, which ran fear-mongering headlines like "Marauding Packs Have Run of the City" (4/25/89). News writers Adam Nagourney (who now writes for the Times) and David J. Krajicek exemplified this mood, writing:
Bands of marauding teenagers similar to the one that ran wild in Central Park last week are creating pockets of anarchy in the city by taking over subway trains .... Cops call them wolf packs; merchants call them rat packs. A social worker says they rampage because "there are no more rules."
These alarmist portrayals of young people of color, often accompanied by highly dubious psychiatric diagnoses of the teens as uniquely remorseless and cruel, helped to create a climate of mass panic that ensured once the suspects were punished, there would be no serious reflection on the ethical, moral or legal reasoning that informed judicial decision-making.
Tragically, this absence of reflection is more the rule than the exception in current media treatment of the case. Although these outlets ran numerous propagandistic and highly misleading stories--neglecting even to use the word "alleged" to describe the accused in 95 percent of news articles--barely any instances of contrition can be found today.
One exception is an article by New York Times journalist Jim Dwyer (5/30/19), who accepts personal accountability, wishing he "had been more skeptical," and "had shouted, rather than mumbled, the doubts [he] did express." Interestingly, he notes in the next sentence:
The enormity of what went wrong was first revealed to a broad audience in a 2012 documentary, Central Park Five, by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns.
This was a full ten years after the sentences against the five exonerees were vacated in 2002, thanks to DNA evidence revealing the crime to have been committed by serial rapist Matias Reyes, but the "enormity of what went wrong"--namely, the public persecution and false imprisonment of five teens for 6 to 13 years--didn't dawn on him until a filmmaker made a documentary about it? Go figure.
And where the New York Times is halfhearted in regret, the New York Daily News is wholly unapologetic in its disregard for basic journalistic integrity. Reviewing When They See Us, Daily News writer Kate Feldman (5/31/19) criticizes the "black-and-white version of the Central Park Five case," and calls attention to "details DuVernay glosses over," specifically the fact that some believe "the teens should have been exonerated for the rape, but not other beatings and muggings that occurred that night."
DuVernay's refusal to engage with this idea that the five teens may have been violent muggers despite not being rapists prompts Feldman to conclude, "More important than the facts is the idea that the facts no longer matter." It is the height of irony that a writer for a publication that regularly trafficked in the worst forms of counterfactual, anti-black racism during this period has more to say about the artistic choices of a filmmaker than the real-life decisions of her editors, or the systems of authority to which these editors often subordinate themselves.
While individual gestures of accountability are certainly welcome, no meaningful reconciliation for the trauma inflicted on these youths and their communities at the hands of the most respected media outlets can be achieved until there is a recognition of the systemic character of the misrepresentations that paved the way for many other young black people like them to enter the penitentiary. This would mean official statements from the New York Times board of editors pointing out the errors in judgement they participated in, and, more importantly, steps being taken today to ensure those moral failures are not repeated. Anything less would be a disservice to McCray, Richardson, Salaam, Santana and Wise, their families, and the countless others who strive every day for a more just and equitable culture of justice.
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