Category: Tax Dollars

Police ≠ Public Safety

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
November 16, 2021

For more than 100 days over the summer of 2020, thousands of Portlanders took to the streets to protest racial injustice, especially police brutality against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Those protests were met by the Portland Police with horrific violence which included:

  • filling the streets with chemical weapons (poisoning from which many have yet to fully recover);
  • beating people (including random residents who were not protest participants) with batons, fists, and weighted gloves;
  • firing impact munitions at close range into people’s chests, backs, heads, faces; and
  •  arresting them on spurious charges.

The results were minuscule, mostly superficial, changes to the outrageously out-of-proportion percentage of the city budget flowing into Portland Police Bureau (PPB) coffers. The city even refused to increase funding for the Portland Street Response, the one public safety initiative that actually was helping people, because the Portland Police Association (PPA), which represents Portland Police officers and protects their jobs even when they murder unarmed civilians, objected.

Photo of the back of a person with Portland Police emblazoned on their jacket, a helmet on their head, standing between partial views of Portland Police vehicles by Tito Texidor IIIYet, last month when the City Budget Office announced a $62 million general fund surplus ahead of the Fall Budget Monitoring Process, Mayor Edward Tevis “Ted” Wheeler quickly maneuvered to give a significant amount of that money to the police.

Wheeler, who is also the Portland Police Commissioner, immediately came up with erroneously named “public safety programs” to add almost $8 million, more than a quarter of the $31 million of the surplus allocated for city programs, to the PPB’s already bloated budget. His proposal includes:

  • hiring additional white supremacist bullies police officers, with no evidence more cops reduce crime;
  • allowing recently retired officers, who timed their departure to maximize their retirement benefits, to double dip return to work;
  • paying a $25,000 (more than many Portland residents earn in a year) signing bonus to “qualified” applicants;
  • wasting almost $3 million on body-worn cameras1 (BWCs)–which have no proven impact on police misconduct–despite the fact that only data showing BWCs increase police accountability were gathered in flawed studies created by manufacturers to sell cameras; and
  • dropping $225,000 on the Gang Enforcement Team (GET) Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) Focused Intervention Team (FIT) Office of Violence Prevention to “assist gun violence reduction work”.

Wheeler, also wants to further persecute insecure, already-suffering, often-despondent, and scared unhoused residents by carving a significant amount of money from funds allocated to help them and instead use that money “increase homeless camp cleanups, or sweeps, ‘fivefold.'”

Last Wednesday, almost 300 Portlanders spent seven hours (mostly) telling the City Commissioners not to spend any of the surplus on more cops. Those who testified in favor of expanding the police department, including business owners who erroneously believe that police prevent burglaries and robberies, spoke without evidence that more cops would solve the problems they presented. They repeated copaganda and used talking points promulgated by the dark-money lobbying group People for Portland that pushes a pro-cop narrative and falsely accuses unhoused Portlanders of perpetuating crime.

Those who spoke against expanding the police department more often cited actual facts. “‘The mayor peddles law enforcement as a deterrent to crime,’ said Seemab Hussaini, an organizer with Unite Oregon. ‘These solutions aren’t based on sound data.'”

In fact, only two days before this meeting, a data analyst, a community organizer, and a public health researcher released a report which uses the Portland Police Bureau’s own statistics to prove that there is absolutely “no correlation between crime levels in Portland and officer staffing levels.” Analyzing almost six years of data points, they found that increasing PPB staffing results in no decrease in crime. This directly contradicts the PPA contention that “The connection between the diminished police presence in Portland, the lack of and availability of resources, and the rise in crime is glaringly obvious.”

Families of homicide victims were among those speaking out in favor of more police. But again, there is no data showing increasing police presence reduces homicides. “Police do not create safety,” Dr. Amara Enyia, policy and research coordinator for the Movement for Black Lives, stated. “Policing is largely reactionary. They come onto the scene after the fact.”

“While police and allies have attempted to use data to tie ‘bail reform’ and racial justice protests to this past year’s rise in murders,” Scott Hechinger, a civil rights attorney, wrote in The Nation, “those claims are contradicted by the geography of the rise in homicides, which occurred across the country: in red and blue states, in jurisdictions that have seen some measured wins for criminal and civil justice and those that haven’t, in jurisdictions that saw protests against police violence, and those that haven’t–and all despite massive police budgets.”

The report repeatedly cited by media sensationalizing the increase in murders–which might be a result of COVID confinement, mass unemployment, or a statistical fluke in historically low and decreasing violent-crime rates–also showed a decline in all other major crimes. If that information gets mentioned by the media, it’s buried.

In reality, additional police presence, which routinely results in oppressive surveillance of and violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, “makes communities less safe and less healthy,” Takenya Nixon Brail, a public defender in Cook County, Illinois, wrote in teenVogue. “Not only does policing fail to prevent violent crime, it creates conditions that allow for even more violence.”

We’ve known for decades what works and what doesn’t to reduce violence and crime. And nothing involving police makes any positive difference including increased police presence, drug resistance education, copaganda police newsletters, scared straight schemes, and home detention or any other carceral programs.

If Portland, or any other city, really wanted to reduce crime and violence, they would redirect the funds sucked up by the police department and put it toward housing support (both for those already unhoused and those in danger of losing their housing), medical (including mental health) care, education (including early childhood education, and childcare programs for working parents, and job training), and food security. Reducing the number of cops would also remove some of the most violent, murderous, repeat offenders who consistently act as if the law does not apply to them from the streets of Portland.

Restorative justice approaches to addressing the root causes of violence and crime have been proven to result in actual improvements in public safety. But, these aren’t as easy to condense to one-sentence hyperbole plastered on billboards across the city and don’t generate generous political donations from businesses and pro-police lobbyists. So Wednesday the Portland City Council is expected to ignore data, the testimony of hundreds,  the demands of organizations representing Black Portlanders such as the NAACP, and the protest of thousands. At least three of the five will vote to throw more millions of dollars at violent criminals with an erroneous expectation that will result in any public safety improvements.

1 BWCs have been suggested by U.S. Department of Justice monitors of the city’s non-compliance with the DOJ Amended Settlement Agreement in its lawsuit against the city for abuse of people with mental health issues as one option for bringing the city into compliance. However, the policies required by the monitors are in direct opposition to those demanded by PPA.

West by God Virginia

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
November 08, 2021

People on social media producing proof of Senator Joe Manchin’s perfidy only demonstrate their own naïvité and ignorance of West Virginia, its culture, and its people. (Disclaimer: I don’t pretend to understand those, either. But I know enough based on my experience there to guess these approaches will make no difference.)

When the state of Virginia seceded from the United States in 1861, twenty-five counties in the northwestern corner of the state broke away and were admitted to the Union as a new state a year later. Yet, if you drive through West Virginia today, you will see the battle flag of Robert E. Lee’s Northern Army of Virginia, commonly misidentified as the confederate flag, flying from houses, decorating pick-up trucks, and emblazoning clothing.

Caricature of Sen. Joe Manchin by Donkey HoteyLast month, author Don Winslow posted a video, which is still circulating and has been viewed millions of times, describing the “vile and provable corruption in Manchin’s life” under the hashtag #JoeManchinSenatorForSale. It breathlessly describes how the Manchin family acquired millions of dollars from coal and pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile, West Virginia remains the second poorest state in the nation; the video ranking its economy 48 out of 50, healthcare 47 out of 50, education 45 out of 50, and infrastructure 50 out of 50.

But, who are these videos for? No one in the senate will step up to take action against Manchin. Those pots know better than to call this particular kettle black.

Manchin won’t change. You can’t shame someone who has no shame. Last week when confronted by climate change protesters, Manchin just drove his Maserati through the crowd. And history won’t “remember” if there’s no one left with enough resources to record it.

Coal baron Manchin owns $5 million in coal company stock and rakes in half a million annually just in dividends in addition to fossil fuel company campaign contributions. He is the designated scapegoat roadblock to prevent Democrats from fulfilling any of the climate change promises they campaigned on in 2020. Although this position has increased Manchin’s power and prestige, the reality is that the Democrats’ corporate owners have no interest in reducing their profits to extend the ability of humans to survive on this planet.

Likewise, while residents of Manchin’s state would benefit from lower drug costs, reducing pharmaceutical company profits might negatively impact stock options for his daughter Heather Bresch, former president and CEO of Mylan, the company that increased the price of EpiPen 500 percent while she was in charge. Since pharmaceutical companies hedge their bets by contributing heavily to candidates from both parties, Manchin’s obstruction of drug price reforms is objectionable to the rest of the senate Democrats only when they’re in front of cameras.

And expecting outrage from West Virginians—the only folks who could actually remove Manchin from office—is a lost cause. Despite the popularity there of the legislation he is blocking, they’ve been voting for him for forty years and before that they repeatedly elected other swindlers.

I was a reporter in West Virginia just more than four decades ago (I left the year before Manchin first ran for public office). As part of the campaign press corps, I followed Democrat Jay Rockefeller around in 1980 when he stood for re-election as governor against Arch Alfred Moore Jr. former chief crook1 governor, who had been prevented by term limits from running in 1976. The joke was that folks should vote for Jay because he wouldn’t steal while in office since he could just buy the entire state. (Not that this reality prevented West Virginia from choosing Moore over Rockefeller in 1972 or from again electing Moore to the governor’s seat in 1984.)

While, unlike his predecessor/successor, he probably helped the state more than he harmed it, New York-born Rockefeller had stayed in West Virginia after completing his VISTA service there specifically to give himself a launching point for a national political career. His 1980 re-election campaign was only too obviously geared to put him in the national spotlight. (A colleague who had returned to his Ohio home to vote reported people coming into the polls and asking why Rockefeller’s name wasn’t on the ballot there since his ads were bleeding over into Ohio and Virginia and Maryland and Kentucky. In fairness, the only media reaching much of the state was based outside of West Virginia.)

Rockefeller outspent Moore 20 to 1 (I made a point of getting the clerks to weigh Rockefeller’s campaign expenditure reports rather than, like everyone else, reciting the absurd number of pages and/or foot-plus thickness), but only received 8 percent more of the total votes. And although Rockefeller served 30 years in the United States Senate (spending more than $12 million, almost $31 million in today’s dollars, to win the seat his first time), his long-planned run for president in 1992 ended after consultations with friends and advisers. (Scuttlebutt pinned his decision on skeletons in his stepfather’s, Senator Charles Harting Percy, closet. Others blamed fears of resurrecting interest in the never-solved 1966 murder of his wife’s twin sister. In either case, the general belief was his decision was made to protect his wife, Sharon Percy Rockefeller.)

Although West Virginians allowed an “outsider” to repeatedly buy a senate seat, they prefer home-grown crooks. Any attempt to “expose” Manchin without examining why West Virginians consistently vote grifters into office will not result in any change.

West Virginia is a gorgeous, interesting, conflicted state (a lovely place to visit, I don’t recommend living there). Advertisements for census workers in 1980 included the requirement, for some areas, that the applicant have the ability to ride and access to use of a horse. The newsroom routinely got wedding announcements for 14-year-olds, so staff only took note when someone in the announcement was 12 or younger. When my parents visited, we were driving back from The Greenbrier to Raleigh County when my mother noted that all the homes we passed were dark. It was Wednesday night, I explained, everyone was in church. At the time, if you wanted to go out to a bar for a drink, your only option was a “private” club (which generally meant forking over $1 for “membership” the first time you visited).

West Virginians resent being stereotyped as ignorant hillbillies. But, on January 20, 1982 I drew the short straw and was sent to accost people on the streets to ask what they thought of the release of the Iranian hostages. More than one person replied, “What hostages?” and even when I provided them additional information had no idea what I was talking about. That inspired me to pull the old journalism-school petition trick a few weeks later. (Without changing a single word except to replace “Bill of Rights” with “Petition” at the top, try to get random people to sign it.) Not only did the vast majority of the dozens of people I asked refuse to sign it, only two recognized it. The coup de grâce was an attorney who, on the courthouse steps and without recognizing the document’s language, objected to the “petition” because he specifically disagreed with number two.

The year I worked at the Post-Herald in Beckley, West Virginia, I initiated and completed three major investigations. As a reporter, I exposed:

  • conflict of interest, prescription misuse, and inappropriate use of federal funds at the county health department and regional health center forcing county officials to terminate their contracts;
  • questionable financial dealings by a local coal baron that resulted in payment of $68,000 ($231,000 in today’s dollars) in back taxes;
  • a local agency’s conflict of interest in use of Comprehensive Employment and Training Act Funds, which resulted in a state investigation.

In all three cases, the original tip came from someone who, like me, was an out-of-state (and more than likely temporary) transplant.

Because, for West Virginians, corrupt politicians, public officials, and other prominent personages are par for the course. Just as they accept coal mines and glass factories exploiting their children, grinding poverty, and crumbling infrastructure worse than elsewhere in the country, West Virginians seem unwilling to rid themselves of the politicians who regularly enrich themselves at the public trough.

1 Moore pleaded guilty to five felonies—including mail fraud, tax fraud, extortion, and obstruction of justice—in 1990 after federal investigators taped him conspiring with his former campaign manager to obstruct their investigation. Although he was fined $3.2 million, he paid only $750,000, and served only two years and eight months in federal prison (in Alabama and Kentucky) and four months of home confinement of a five-year and ten-month sentence. Just the illegal payments and extortion income he pled guilty to neglecting to include on his income tax amounted to more than a million 1980 dollars ($3.4 million today).

Voices of the Unheard

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
June 16, 2021

June. Midsummer. Pride Month. And, for many jurisdictions, the month to pass an annual budget.

Overwhelmingly, those budgets prove that elected officials do not listen when they invite their constituents to attend “hearings” about how they should spend taxpayers’ money. We saw it in their faces on Zoom. We watched them turning off cameras, eating their lunch, sending texts, driving, or, in the ultimate message about how much value they put on their constituents’ opinions, relieving themselves.

“They don’t listen. They just nod.”

Photo of a laptop computer with a zoom meeting, faces blurred, on the screen. A ceramic coffee mug sits next to the keyboard. The back of a chair, matching distressed dining room table, is visible behind the cup.This month, city after city and county after county are following the example set by the U.S. government and even the most “progressive” states when approving their budgets. Either they have unconditionally retreated or completely circumvented any political promises to protesters that they would reduce police funding. They continue to pour billions of dollars–often at the expense of key government programs, mental health services, education, housing, etc.–into the always gaping, never appeased, maw of police/sheriff/trooper budgets to the benefit of almost no one except those wearing the uniforms/badges.

In Minneapolis, where the city council promised to replace the police department with a public safety department after a cop, with three others watching, murdered George Floyd, voted instead to spend $6.4 million to hire dozens of officers  while the police chief coordinated with public relations professionals to protect his budget.

In the U.S. Congress, the so-called George Floyd Act, which would not have saved George Floyd’s life, hands $750 million more to police. “Protesters have been demanding to defund the police to keep us safe; not spend millions of dollars to investigate how we die. We know how we die–the police.”

In cities around the world, millions of people took to the streets over the summer to protest police brutality and abuse. Across the United States, hundreds of municipal, county, and state governments held hearings during which thousands of people demanded they stop militarizing law enforcement (which neither reduces crime nor increases officer safety) and slash police budgets.

Every single elected body then ignored their constituents to one degree or another. Instead, they listened to the lies pushed by slave patrols police officials and the associations that represent them about how they cannot provide what they call public safety without more funds and complete immunity for the crimes they commit while on duty.

Except police define “public safety” as protecting property owned by the wealthy, the corporations, the privileged. As anyone who does not fit into those categories and has had their house burgled, their car stolen, their wallet/identify lifted will report, the police do nothing to prevent or solve the crimes they are victims of. Those who are beaten, raped, murdered–even when the police are not the ones committing the offenses–rarely receive assistance from cops. Police certainly do not prevent any of those crimes. They often enable them by ignoring complaints of violence committed by white people against those who have dark skin, speak a foreign language, wear religious clothing, are not straight, etc.

At best, the cops might arrest someone after someone has been crippled, traumatized, killed; coerce a confession from them; and close the case. Whether or not the person arrested was the actual perpetrator does not matter much to them. Especially if that person is Black, brown, or Indigenous; houseless; consumed drugs at any time in their life; shoplifted groceries when they were hungry; painted some graffiti art; or once got a speeding ticket. Those demographics and behaviors make anyone arrested for any reason a criminal who should be locked up for life according to cops who routinely consume drugs stolen from suspects and evidence rooms, pilfer millions of dollars from innocent civilians through forfeiture, vandalize vehicles at protests and through malicious traffic stops, ignore all traffic laws, and commit a multitude of other crimes.

And the refusal of elected and appointed officials to listen to their constituents is not limited to police funding. A few examples:

  • The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), ignoring all data proving that building more freeways does not decrease traffic congestion and tolling the highway creates traffic problems on surface streets, is pushing both agendas despite the objections of everyone in the city of Portland (except, of course, the contractors and developers who stand to make millions). Meanwhile, people continue to die on Portland streets classified as state highways that “ODOT refuses to fix with basic safety measures”.
  • Missouri lawmakers, claiming “voters didn’t understand the potential cost”, are sabotaging a voter-approved amendment to the state constitution which would have given thousands of low-income adults access to health insurance.
  • In Florida, voters passed a constitutional amendment aimed at allowing felons who have served their sentences to vote. Lawmakers immediately circumvented voters by requiring felons to pay “legal financial obligations” before their rights could be restored. In addition, Florida Republicans are now trying to prevent ballot-initiative drives by restricting fundraising capabilities.
  • People in the three-county (Washington, Multnomah, and Clackamas) Portland metropolitan area demanded transit police be defunded and that money used to eliminate fares. Instead, Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office took command of TriMet’s Transit Police after Portland Police Bureau participation was withdrawn by the city council.
  • Idaho voters passed a ballot initiative to accept federal funds for Medicaid expansion. Not only did Idaho’s legislators attempt to prevent state residents from receiving benefits, in retribution they also worked to curtail the ballot initiative process.
  • South Dakota state legislators repealed voter-approved restrictions on campaign finance and lobbying.
  • Sheriffs in 20 of Washington’s 39 counties are refusing to enforce restrictions on access to and use of so-called assault weapons which were overwhelmingly approved by voters.
  • State legislators in Utah overhauled both medical marijuana and Medicaid expansion bills drafted and supported by voters.
  • After collecting hours upon hours of video showing that Portland Police routinely and brutally attack peaceful protesters and journalists with weapons of war (attacks which have already resulted in at least one settlement with the city with multiple additional lawsuits filed) and numerous complaints about “peace police” telling other protesters how they should behave, the city of Portland decided to spend thousands of dollars on “conflict resolution training for…the protesters”.

Since voters making their opinions known via the ballot box, initiative petitions, and public “hearings” are getting between elected officials and their donors, the obvious solution for elected officials is to eliminate the ability of many of those people to vote. Almost 400 voter suppression bills have been put before legislatures in all but two of the “united” states just this year.

Those elected officials have made it clear that it does not matter to them what the vast majority of citizens wants. They are elected to represent a small minority dedicated to sustaining white supremacy and the privileges it grants them. Clinging to power, the wealthy, the corporations, the privileged, and their elected toadies will do everything to retain it.

Voting, testifying at public hearings, initiatives, petitions, and letter writing campaigns will not change that.

“There are many in our community that want to pretend last year did not happen,” Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty told a group of protesters memorializing George Floyd on May 22, 2021. “That it was a bad dream … and they just want to wake up and go back to normal. I refuse to go back to an unjust normal.”

It is going to be a very long, very hot summer.