{"id":"lists/tag/profile/sam-levin","title":"Sam Levin","style":{"primaryColour":"#005689","secondaryColour":"#4bc6df","overlayColour":"#183f5d","backgroundColour":"#ffffff","lightModeBackgroundColour":"#FFFFFF","darkModeBackgroundColour":"#000000","lightModeTitleColour":"#121212","darkModeTitleColour":"#DCDCDC","lightModeLineColour":"#121212","darkModeLineColour":"#333333"},"pagination":{"currentPage":1,"totalPages":78,"uris":{"next":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/lists/tag/profile/sam-levin?page=2","last":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/lists/tag/profile/sam-levin?page=78"}},"contributor":{"name":"Sam Levin","bio":"
Sam Levin is a correspondent for Guardian US, based in Los Angeles. Click here for Sam's public key. Twitter @SamTLevin
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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles and agencies","body":"The former US senator Joe Lieberman, who ran as the Democratic nominee for vice-president in the 2000 election and became the first Jewish candidate on a major-party ticket for the White House, alongside presidential candidate Al Gore, has died at the age of 82.
\nLieberman died in New York due to complications from a fall, according to a statement from his family. He was a Connecticut senator for four terms.
\nLieberman took one of the most controversial arcs in recent US political history. Though he had the status of a breakthrough candidate for America’s Jewish community as Gore’s running mate, his support for president George W Bush’s Iraq war heralded a rightward journey that saw him anger many Democrats.
\nLieberman sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 but his support for the war in Iraq doomed his candidacy with voters, amid increasing anger at the invasion and its bloody aftermath. It also meant Lieberman was rejected by Connecticut’s Democrats when he ran for a fourth Senate term there in 2006.
\nHowever, in what he said was a vindication of his positions, he kept his Senate seat by running as an independent candidate, with substantial support from Republican and independent voters.
\nBy 2008, Lieberman was a high-profile supporter of Republican senator John McCain in his bid to defeat Democrat Barack Obama’s quest to become America’s first Black president.
\nThus Lieberman did manage to both impress and offend people across party lines. He expressed strong support for gay rights, civil rights, abortion rights and environmental causes that often won him praise of many Democrats, and he frequently fit mould of a north-east liberal. He played a key role in legislation that established the US Department of Homeland Security.
\nHe was also the first national Democrat to publicly criticize President Bill Clinton for his extramarital affair with then White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He scolded Clinton for “disgraceful behavior”, earning the ire of his party – though his position has become much more standard in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
\nAs he sought a political home outside Democratic politics, Lieberman’s close friend in the Senate John McCain was leaning strongly toward choosing him as vice-president for the 2008 Republican ticket, but Lieberman’s history of liberal policies were seen as too unpopular for McCain to pull off such a move with his conservative base. He plumped for Sarah Palin instead.
\nIn announcing his retirement from the Senate in 2013, Lieberman acknowledged that he did “not always fit comfortably into conventional political boxes” and felt his first responsibility was to serve his constituents, state and country, not his political party.
\nHarry Reid, who served as Senate Democratic leader, once said that while he didn’t always agree with the independent-minded Lieberman, he respected him.
“Regardless of our differences, I have never doubted Joe Lieberman’s principles or his patriotism,” Reid said. “And I respect his independent streak, as it stems from strong convictions.”
After leaving the Senate, Lieberman joined a New York law firm and took up company boards – as is common for retiring senators. But his public positions continued to be a mish-mash of liberal and rightwing views.
\n\nHe endorsed Donald Trump’s controversial decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and was a public supporter of Trump’s rightwing education secretary Betsy DeVos – a hated figure for many liberals. But at the same time, he endorsed Hilary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 in their runs for the White House.
\nLieberman continued to push his message of compromise with his 2021 book The Centrist Solution, comparing far-right extremists to progressive leftists in a Guardian interview at the time, saying: “The divisive forces in both of our two major parties have moved further away from the centre. But I believe those more extreme segments of both parties are in the minority in both parties.”
\nHe also said he was optimistic that “more mainstream, centrist elements” in the Republican party would take over again.
\nHe remained active in recent years as the founding chairman of No Labels, an organization to encourage bipartisanship but which is currently exploring backing a third-party bid for the presidency as Trump and Biden face off again. Faced with criticisms that the group’s efforts could boost Trump’s chance at victory, Lieberman said last year he did not want to see Trump re-elected, but that he believed Democrats would fare better if Biden was not running. In recent weeks, No Labels has struggled to find a candidate as ballot deadlines near.
\nLieberman grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, where his father operated a liquor store. He was the eldest of three siblings in an Orthodox Jewish family. A Yale law school graduate, Lieberman went on to serve as Connecticut attorney general in 1983, before defeating the incumbent Republican, Lowell Weicker, to earn his Senate seat in 1988.
\nTributes poured in from both sides of the aisle on Wednesday night. Chris Murphy, a US senator from Connecticut, said in a statement that his state was “shocked by Senator Lieberman’s sudden passing”, adding: “In an era of political carbon copies, Joe Lieberman was a singularity. One of one. He fought and won for what he believed was right and for the state he adored.”
\nChuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa and oldest sitting senator at 90, recalled working with Lieberman on whistleblower initiatives, saying in a statement: “Joe was a dedicated public servant working [with] anyone regardless of political stripe.”
\nGore published a tribute praising Lieberman as a “truly gifted leader, whose affable personality and strong will made him a force to be reckoned with”, recounting his former running mate’s support of the 1960s civil rights movement.
\nObama wrote that he and Lieberman “didn’t always see eye-to-eye”, but commended the former senator for supporting the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the passage of the Affordable Care Act: “In both cases the politics were difficult, but he stuck to his principles because he knew it was the right thing to do.”
\nPaul Harris and the Associated Press contributed to this report
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2a15a837a692a77fc8887a901207346ea6620015/0_0_5760_3456/master/5760.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=63e67b51216279b6c1ee492d549a8613","height":3456,"width":5760,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Joe Lieberman pictured in September last year. Photograph: Photograph: Yana Paskova/Reuters","credit":"Yana Paskova/Reuters","altText":"Close-up of man wearing suit and shirt","cleanCaption":"Joe Lieberman pictured in September last year.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Yana Paskova/Reuters"}],"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5b192411ef37c20feb521003b0d258609d99036d/0_0_2000_1402/master/2000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=e8efef90ff6074e4a811e109dddef023","height":1402,"width":2000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Al Gore and Joe Lieberman at a campaign rally in Jackson, Tennessee, in 2000. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Apple Valley, California","body":"When Ryan Gainer was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, he was nonverbal, and his family all learned sign language to communicate with him. But after the southern California boy learned how to speak at around age four, he was a “ball of energy” who never stopped talking, his older sister Rachel said.
\nHe loved saying “hi” to neighbors and strangers alike, and as a young teen was known as the student who greeted everyone with a “good morning” and a smile.
\nRyan’s family spoke of his early years and bright presence two weeks after his life was cut short at age 15, when sheriff deputies were called to his home and fatally shot him during a mental health episode. The tragedy has sparked outrage and escalated concerns about how US law enforcement uses force against people with disabilities.
\n“He was a funny, talented, goofy kid – just a beautiful soul. He saw the good in everyone,” Rachel, 34, said at her home in Apple Valley, a remote desert town two hours east of Los Angeles. “We want accountability.”
\nRyan was killed on 9 March when officers responded to a 911 call from one of his family members, who reported he was breaking things in their house and “hitting” his sister, but that she wasn’t injured. Body-camera footage showed that two San Bernardino sheriff deputies shot Ryan within roughly five seconds of seeing him. The videos captured someone inside the home saying Ryan had a “stick”, then Ryan appearing in the doorway. He moved toward a deputy, who immediately threatened to shoot – and fired as he ran from Ryan.
\nThe department said Ryan was holding a 5ft-long gardening tool with a “sharp” end and labeled the encounter an “attempted murder of peace officer” in a press release. Ryan appeared to be holding the tool over his head, but the footage didn’t clearly capture the moment of the shooting nor did it show him attacking or attempting to assault the officer.
\n\nAt a press conference outside the family home on Thursday, standing near the spot in the front yard where Ryan was shot, the family’s attorneys announced they were filing a claim against San Bernardino county, the first step in a lawsuit. One lawyer held up a hula hoe similar to the one Ryan had held – a wooden stick with a metal end used for weeding. He encouraged reporters to touch it – noting the end was not, in fact, sharp as the department had alleged.
\nRyan joined the Gainer family as a foster child in 2010, at the age of two, his two older sisters said in an interview. He had a lot of health challenges, including Crohn’s disease, seizures, an ear rupture and an early autism diagnosis. The family didn’t know a lot about autism at the time, but they did everything they could to educate themselves and support his development, and finalized his adoption in 2011.
\n“He was strong and always happy, no matter what he was going through,” said his father, Norman Gainer. Ryan was highly intelligent from a young age, excelling at multiplication in kindergarten and winning reading awards in middle school. He could easily memorize license plates and addresses and had an incredible sense of direction and knowledge of geography.
\n“When I was in college, he was helping me with my math,” said Rebecca Gainer, his 27-year-old sister. Rachel, who is a pilot and member of the national guard, said she took Ryan flying and he could point out every freeway below them while she had to consult her maps.
\nAs he got older, Ryan at times grappled with teasing and bullying, “but he stood up for himself”, said Rachel. “I was so proud of him.”
\nHis father said Ryan wanted to switch from special education to general classes, where he “flourished” despite the challenges. “He just wanted to be treated the same as everyone else … All of these things, he overcame.”
\n\nSome days, he’d come home from school hungry and would explain that he skipped lunch to help another student with math or other work, Rachel added. He ran cross-country and enjoyed racing his two sisters. He also aspired to be a mechanical engineer, recently teaching robotics to other youth as part of a local program.
\nThe family all lived together at their home in Apple Valley, and Ryan would act as Rebecca’s “alarm clock”, she said, waking her up on time for work every day. “He was our missing piece,” she said, noting that the three siblings shared the same initials and called themselves “the RDGs”.
\nIn September, their mother, Sharon, suffered a stroke and became partially paralyzed, which hit Ryan hard, his sisters said. “I saw him grow up, because he was really taking care of her,” Rachel said. Rebecca recalled him keeping time of their mothers’ seizures and helping her monitor her blood pressure. Ryan also suffered the losses of his close aunt and his cat around that time, and it became a “domino effect” that affected his mental health, Rachel said, contributing to his episode earlier this month.
\nThe case has renewed scrutiny of how police treat people with autism and developmental disabilities, particularly Black Americans who are already disproportionately killed by officers.
\nIn 2016, a Florida officer shot at a man with autism, who was sitting in the street with a toy truck, and injured his caregiver. In 2019, Colorado officers and paramedics restrained and killed Elijah McClain, who wasn’t accused of a crime and who said: “I’m an introvert … I’m just different.” That year, Pennsylvania police killed Osaze Osagie, a 29-year-old autistic man whose parents had sought officers’ help. In 2021, Los Angeles deputies shot and paralyzed Isaias Cervantes, who had autism and was hard of hearing.
\n“It’s heartbreaking. We can’t catch a break,” said Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, the Texas-based founder of Advocacy Without Borders, a non-profit dedicated to disability justice. She’s autistic and has two autistic teenagers, and fears for their safety. She’s told her children not to call police and doesn’t let them drive in hopes of reducing potential officer interactions. “I have ‘the talk’ constantly with them, and I hate it – I feel like it’s robbed them of the ability to just be a kid.”
\nWhen police encounter a Black child like Ryan in crisis, “They see danger, someone unruly, a thug,” said Giwa Onaiwu. “The adultification of Black children is very real. They’re seen as big, scary, out of control.”
\nThe San Bernardino sheriff, Shannon Dicus, faced swift criticisms last week when he said Ryan was “large of stature” and “physically fit”, and “juveniles can be dangerous”.
\nAudrey Christiansen, a Boston medical center pediatrician, who has studied police training on autism, said some officers are ill-equipped to respond to mental health crises: “The family calls for help … and police get there and they don’t know what to do. Officers say they feel overwhelmed.”
\nAutistic youth, even if they’re verbal, may struggle to communicate with officers in high-stress moments and may need physical space and time to respond, she said. In some cases, youth may be especially sensitive to physical touch. The presence of many officers or sounds of sirens could further escalate conflicts. Christiansen emphasized that each person’s circumstances and needs are unique and officers should work with providers and relatives.
\nDicus said deputies had responded to Ryan’s home on five previous occasions and taken him to treatment without using force. He declined to say whether the deputies who shot him knew this.
\n\nHadiya Kennedy, a former Los Angeles police department officer who has worked as a therapist for autistic children, said the deputies should have known about the prior incidents and approached the home with a plan based on that history. Kennedy, a board member of the Always for the People Foundation, a non-profit supporting families affected by police violence, called Ryan’s killing an “avoidable tragedy” in a statement: “The deputies involved failed this family.”
\nDicus told reporters deputies followed “training protocols” and that he believed there wasn’t time to use stun guns, pepper spray or other tactics: “Officers are not required to be hit over the head with something … Lethal force is perfectly appropriate.” He declined an interview request.
\nAt the Thursday news briefing, family lawyer DeWitt Lacy said the sheriff’s department had also treated the family as if they were “criminals” in the aftermath of the killing – grabbing and dragging his mother out of her wheelchair and then forcing her to come to the station, without informing her that her son had died. Ryan’s aunt told reporters that officers had threatened to arrest family members arriving to the scene.
\nHis mother tried to speak at the press conference, but was too distraught to get words out. Before the news cameras had arrived, his sisters said they couldn’t comprehend Ryan not making it to his 16th birthday later this year. He had been eager to learn to drive so he could help his mother. “He said: ‘I’m going to drive her everywhere, wherever she wants to go,’” Rebecca said.
\nRyan’s Apple Valley high school classmates said he was well-known for his kindness and contagious smile.
\n“He would talk to everyone, asking how their day was, making sure they’re OK. He attracted people,” said Maddi Bauer, 17, who became friends with Ryan on her first day of junior year when she couldn’t find a seat on the bus: “All I remember was seeing this big, bright, welcoming, safe smile [when] Ryan offered me a spot right next to him. I took that spot not knowing the impact he would have on my life.”
\nThe two became close – they would film TikTok trends, tell jokes to others on the bus or play Nintendo. When she struggled to excel at a game he loved, “he insisted that I could do anything [and] always encouraged me”, she said. “He never judged me. Instead he taught me to not care what others would think.” He loved making memes and jamming to his favorite song, United States of Whatever, she said.
\nMaddi said Ryan sometimes talked about feeling sad, but that she couldn’t understand how he could ever be considered violent: “He was the person who uplifted people and made everyone’s face light up.” After she transferred out of Apple Valley high, they kept in touch. One of his final messages read: “I just want to make sure everything is okay and that you’re doing good.”
\n“Ryan had the sweetest soul. He made such a huge impact,” added Leila Hanoum, a 15-year-old Apple Valley student, who first met him in middle school. He’d make her laugh by sneaking up and scaring her. Leila said students were in shock, and her classes felt quiet as people struggled to talk about the tragedy. She regretted that she and Ryan had lost touch during the last month: “I wish I could’ve had more long conversations with him. We all miss Ryan.”
\nAs videos of Ryan’s death have spread, his classmates and family have been sharing old footage from when he was alive, including of him as a young boy jumping on a bed and clapping, or him as a teenager doing TikTok challenges. In one recent video, Ryan smiled as he offered a message of positivity to viewers:
\n“Make sure you have a great day, be the spark, and make sure to spread kindness.”
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/58c609c24a745f5347fbaa063323831ab85596b5/0_761_1200_720/master/1200.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1e1bccb2c6a414bdefad7aa9f789826a","height":720,"width":1200,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Norman Gainer, right, said his son, Ryan Gainer, overcame significant adversities: ‘He just wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.’ Photograph: Photograph: Courtesy of Burris, Nisenbaum, Curry & Lacy","credit":"Courtesy of Burris, Nisenbaum, Curry & Lacy","altText":"A selfie taken in the son of a Black teenager with curly black hair and a Black man wearing sunglasses, and a bald head, both smiling, maybe at an outdoor festival or a theme park.","cleanCaption":"Norman Gainer, right, said his son, Ryan Gainer, overcame significant adversities: ‘He just wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.’","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Courtesy of Burris, Nisenbaum, Curry & Lacy"}],"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/17696adeb81b410a047319d870410ec705740edd/0_0_4032_3024/master/4032.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c42f7a6fe5a9c8291a0632d2e03a98f8","height":3024,"width":4032,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"A memorial for Ryan Gainer outside his family’s home in Apple Valley, California. 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Gainer, right, said his son, Ryan Gainer, overcame significant adversities: ‘He just wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.’ Photograph: Photograph: Courtesy of Burris, Nisenbaum, Curry & Lacy","credit":"Courtesy of Burris, Nisenbaum, Curry & Lacy","altText":"A selfie taken in the son of a Black teenager with curly black hair and a Black man wearing sunglasses, and a bald head, both smiling, maybe at an outdoor festival or a theme park.","cleanCaption":"Norman Gainer, right, said his son, Ryan Gainer, overcame significant adversities: ‘He just wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.’","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Courtesy of Burris, Nisenbaum, Curry & Lacy"},"campaigns":[],"atoms":[],"atomsCSS":[],"atomsJS":[],"permutiveTracking":{"id":"us-news/2024/mar/21/ryan-gainer-autistic-teen-police-killing-california","title":"‘A talented, goofy kid’: family of Ryan Gainer, autistic teen killed by police, speak out","type":"Article","section":"us news","authors":["Sam 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tool","item":{"id":"us-news/2024/mar/13/california-sheriff-bodycam-footage-police-killing-ryan-gainer","title":"California sheriff releases video showing killing of boy, 15, holding garden tool","trailText":"Outrage over killing of Ryan Gainer, shot three times on Saturday, as sheriff denounced for defending deputies’ use of lethal force","standFirst":"Outrage over killing of Ryan Gainer, shot three times on Saturday, as sheriff denounced for defending deputies’ use of lethal force
","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"The San Bernardino, California sheriff released new body-camera footage of the fatal police shooting of 15-year-old Ryan Gainer, who was holding a gardening tool.
\nThe Saturday killing of Ryan, who was autistic and having a mental health crisis, sparked national outrage and escalating criticisms, prompting the head of the department, Sheriff Shannon Dicus, to show reporters additional footage during a Wednesday press conference. The sheriff also revealed that it appeared two deputies on the scene had fired three rounds at Ryan.
\nDicus repeatedly defended the deputies’ use of lethal force, at one point referencing Ryan’s “large stature” – a comment that drew immediate backlash from local civil rights advocates.
\n\nAudio of 911 calls and partial clips first released on Monday indicated that a relative called police to report Ryan was breaking things in their house and had attacked his sister. At one point, the caller said Ryan had said he was “going to run away”.
\nThe first 15-second video released showed one deputy arriving at the home in Apple Valley, east of Los Angeles, to find an open front door. A man inside could be heard saying, “He’s got a stick in his hand,” and soon after, Ryan appeared holding the gardening tool, identified as a 5ft hula hoe.
\nThe deputy at the door shouted: “Get back … you’re going to get shot.”
\nThe newly released footage captured the moment of the shooting as Ryan moved toward the deputy, although the deputy was running away from him and facing the other direction. The shooting was not visible on the video. When the deputy and his camera turned back to Ryan, he was lying on the ground.
\nFootage from another deputy, who was the second to arrive, captured that deputy shooting Ryan from a distance. Ryan appeared to be holding the tool over his head when he was shot by both deputies. The footage, however, is grainy. Both deputies shot Ryan less than a minute after arriving, and within roughly seven seconds of him appearing in their view. Dicus did not name the deputies.
\nThe footage captured Ryan’s family members screaming in the aftermath, saying: “Why did you shoot him? … Why didn’t you tase him? Where are your Tasers?”
\nDicus said he did not believe there was an opportunity to use a stun gun or other weapons: “The use of a Taser in this situation with the amount of time or the use of pepper-spray would not have been something we would have been able to react to quick enough. Ultimately we have to stop this problem … law enforcement officers are not required to be hit over the head with something. What happens when they get incapacitated? … The deputies followed through with what their training protocols are.”
\nHe later said: “Certainly juveniles can be dangerous. He is large of stature. He is physically fit.”
\nDeWitt Lacy, a civil rights lawyer representing the Gainer family, criticized the remarks in an interview after the briefing, saying: “Across America, we’ve often heard of the ‘Herculean Black man’ and ‘wild savage’ that needs to be put down. We won’t allow Ryan’s name and image to be concocted or depicted in that way.”
\nLacy added: “This kid was not a savage, and no one was in imminent danger of death or great bodily injury at the time of the shooting.
\n“They used the deadliest action they could do because of this myth of the Black man, the Black monster … He was just a kid. It’s the responsibility of law enforcement to deal with these types of situations without killing us.”
\nDicus, the sheriff, said the department had been called to the home to assist with Ryan on five previous occasions, and had previously taken him to mental health facilities without using any force. He said he could not say whether the deputies who shot him were aware of that history when they responded on Saturday, and he criticized the local mental health care system for failing to take care of his needs.
\n\nThe family has also said that the sheriff’s department was slow to render aid to Ryan after shooting him. The footage showed the deputies waiting roughly a minute to approach Ryan while he is on the ground and while the family is screaming, saying: “He’s dying … Why would you do that?”
\n“Ryan was lying there, moaning in agonizing pain and impending death while they took no action,” Lacy said after watching the footage. After a minute, deputies moved to try to treat his wounds, though the department cut out audio during the treatment, Dicus said, to protect the investigation.
\nRyan was a cross-country runner who aspired to be an engineer, his family said. Community organizer Sennett Devermont, whose group Always for the People Foundation advocates for families of people killed by police, has been working with Ryan’s relatives and friends and posted old footage one of them shared of Ryan speaking in a TikTok video: “To all the viewers, make sure you have a great day, be the spark, and make sure to spread kindness,” the teenager said.
\nDevermont called for the deputies to be terminated and face criminal charges. “It’s imperative that officers who are this irresponsible are held accountable. Without accountability, I don’t know how we can expect this to stop.”
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/de18e8538ae4ee5639ea9f3d702db45cc2377e54/0_51_1179_707/master/1179.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1618cc7d8e9fa1b94120074464000149","height":707,"width":1179,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Ryan Gainer was shot dead by police deputies. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"A sheriff’s deputy in southern California shot and killed a 15-year-old boy who was holding a gardening tool, officials said.
\nThe San Bernardino county sheriff’s department was responding to a 911 call on Saturday from a family reporting that a boy, identified as Ryan Gainer, was attacking his family at their home in Apple Valley, east of Los Angeles. The department said he was holding a 5ft gardening tool and approaching the first deputy who arrived at the scene when the deputy shot him. Gainer was later taken to a hospital where he died.
\nA lawyer for the family said Gainer was a cross-country runner who had autism and said the fatal shooting did not appear to be warranted.
\nThe sheriff’s department released 911 audio and partial body-camera footage to the Guardian on Monday, but the clips do not capture the moment of the shooting, and a spokesperson declined to release additional video.
\n\nOn the call, a woman reported that her brother was attacking one of their sisters and trying to break a window and door. The audio captured yelling in the background, and the woman told the dispatcher: “They gotta take him in.”
\nDuring the roughly five-minute call, the woman said the other relatives were trying to keep their distance from him. At one point, she said: “He’s talking to my dad right now. He said he’s going to run away and then he came back to the house.” She also said he had a piece of glass.
\nThe department released two roughly 15-second body-camera clips, but both clips end before the shooting. Footage from one deputy showed him arriving at the home, where the front door was open. A man inside could be heard saying: “He’s got a stick in his hand.” Gainer then appeared and started quickly walking out of the home toward the deputy, who pointed his gun toward the boy and shouted: “Get back, get back, or you’re going to get shot.”
\nThe deputy appeared to be walking backward, then running away from the boy, pointing his gun at him. The other clip captured that same moment from another deputy who was arriving and standing at a distance. Gainer appeared to be holding the tool over his head, but it is unclear what he was doing as he was shot.
\nA department spokesperson said it would not be releasing full body-camera footage on Monday and declined to say where Gainer was shot, how many bullets were fired and if multiple deputies had shot him. The spokesperson also declined to name the deputies on scene and said the case was still under investigation.
\n“There are great questions as to whether it was appropriate to use deadly force against a 15-year-old autistic kid who was having an episode,” said DeWitt Lacy, a civil rights lawyer representing the family. “We need to see the video and the moment of the shooting … but it doesn’t seem like anyone was in imminent danger of death or great bodily injury.”
\n\nLacy said it appeared Gainer was potentially hit with three bullets, including in his torso and abdomen. He said he was concerned that the department had refused to disclose the footage of the final moments of the shooting and the aftermath: “We understand the gamesmanship that is involved when municipalities err and kill people unnecessarily.”
\nThe family also reported that the deputies delayed helping Gainer after he was shot, Lacy said. He said: “They have to give medical aid to this 15-year-old they just shot and it certainly seems they failed to do that.” The sheriff department’s initial press release said deputies “quickly rendered medical aid” before paramedics arrived.
\nLacy said the family also reported that after the shooting, the family was forced out of the home while officers “rummaged through their house looking for any justification for shooting and killing Ryan”.
\nIn addition to his involvement on a cross-country team, Gainer also wanted to be an engineer, Lacy said.
\nShannon Dicus, the elected San Bernardino sheriff, defended the use of lethal force in a statement, saying: “Our social safety net for those experiencing mental illness needs to be strengthened. Our deputies handle seemingly insurmountable calls daily. Most of these calls do not end in violence. However, this one ended in tragedy for Ryan, his family, and for the deputies who responded.
\n“Rapidly evolving, violent encounters are some of the most difficult, requiring split-second decisions,” Dicus continued. “While these decisions are lawful, they are awful in terms of our humanity. I feel for both Ryan’s family and my deputies who will struggle with this for their entire lives.”
\nThe shooting comes amid growing scrutiny over how police officers and sheriff’s deputies respond to people who are facing mental health crises. The San Bernardino sheriff’s department was sued last year for fatally shooting Tony Garza amid a mental health episode. Lawyers for Garza’s family alleged that he was shot a dozen times as he fled.
\nThe department has faced other recent scandals. In February last year, a jury awarded $375,000 to a truck driver who sued for wrongful arrest; the man was taken into custody after making a snide remark to a San Bernardino deputy who stopped him outside a grocery store. And in December, a deputy resigned after the department investigated a tip that he and a former deputy were “involved in drug activity”.
\nThere have also been growing concerns about how police rush to use lethal force against people holding objects that are not weapons. In February, the Los Angeles police department fatally shot a man who was holding a plastic fork, which followed a string of incidents in which LAPD officers shot people with harmless objects in their hands, including a phone, a bike part and a car part.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/de18e8538ae4ee5639ea9f3d702db45cc2377e54/0_51_1179_707/master/1179.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1618cc7d8e9fa1b94120074464000149","height":707,"width":1179,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Ryan Gainer was taken to hospital where he later died. 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","byline":"Lois Beckett and Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"Adam Schiff, the centrist Democratic congressman, is poised to be the next US senator from California after securing enough votes to advance to the November election. He will face off with Republican Steve Garvey, a former professional baseball player, who also performed well in the non-partisan primary on Tuesday.
\n\nSchiff, a pro-Israel Democrat, was quickly called a winner by the Associated Press, and Garvey secured his spot in the general election about an hour after polls closed.
\nThe two progressive Democratic candidates were trailing far behind, with the Orange county congresswoman Katie Porter in third place and the Bay Area congresswoman Barbara Lee in the fourth spot.
\nGarvey stands little chance of winning in the general election; the last time a Republican won a statewide seat in California was in 2006. Facing off in the runoff with an inexperienced Republican candidate in a majority-Democratic state would probably see Schiff cruise to victory in November.
\nThe primary broke records as the most expensive Senate race in California. Schiff’s campaign is widely seen as having engineered Garvey’s strong primary performance by spending millions of dollars to air ads attacking Garvey, the former first baseman for the LA Dodgers and an inexperienced Republican candidate, thus elevating his name recognition among Republican voters in a way the Garvey campaign itself was not able to afford.
\n\nSchiff’s strategy appeared to be effective at boxing out his two Democratic progressive competitors. Neither Porter nor Lee are expected to return to Congress next year, after choosing to compete in the Senate race rather than run for re-election in their House districts.
\nLee, a longtime progressive, had called for a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2023. Porter broke with the Biden administration in December to call for a “bilateral ceasefire”.
\nSchiff, in contrast, has shown continuing support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and has refused to call for a ceasefire, a position that has sparked protests by some young progressive California Democrats.
\nPolls showed Porter, a nationally prominent consumer advocate known for grilling CEOs with the help of her trademark whiteboard, would have been a strong competitor against Schiff in a two-Democrat race.
\nIn early polls, Porter had been coming in second after Schiff, with Lee trailing behind, until growing support for Garvey pushed Porter into third place.
\n\nPorter denounced the Schiff campaign’s ads targeting Garvey in early February, writing Schiff was “playing cynical, anti-democratic political games to avoid a competitive election in November” and that “voters deserve better”.
\nGarvey has done minimal campaigning for the seat and gave a lackluster performance in campaign debates. He has struggled to answer policy questions from journalists. When asked about homelessness and his lack of specific ideas, he said: “Once we get through the primary, I’ll start a deeper dive into the [issues].” In addition to his baseball career, he also starred in weight-loss infomercials and is reportedly estranged from several of his adult children.
\nSchiff was the frontrunner throughout the California Senate primary, thanks to his fundraising prowess, and a public profile burnished by his prominent roles in the first impeachment of Donald Trump and the investigation of the January 6 insurrection.
\nIn all, at least $65.3m was spent on advertisements in the Senate primary battle, a record-breaking amount more than the last three Senate races combined, Politico reported, citing data from AdImpact, a political ad-tracking service.
\nPorter’s campaign was also targeted in the race’s last month by $10m in attack ads from a Super Pac funded by the cryptocurrency industry. The Pac celebrated Porter’s defeat in a statement on Tuesday night. In a speech after the race was called for Schiff, Porter told supporters: “We had the establishment running scared – withstanding three-to-one in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires who spent millions peddling lies and our opponent spending more to boost the Republican than promoting his own campaign.”
\nSchiff struggled to deliver his victory speech as protesters interrupted throughout his remarks, shouting: “Ceasefire now!”
\nIn a statement after polls closed, Lee quoted her “mentor and friend” Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman in Congress, who said: “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”
\nShe added: “Our campaign has always been about giving a voice to people who don’t feel heard in Washington – and I’m exceptionally proud of the grassroots, multi-ethnic, cross-generational coalition this campaign built across California.”
\nThe California Senate seat became available after Dianne Feinstein, the longest-serving woman in the US Senate, died in September. Laphonza Butler, a Democratic strategist and former labor leader, was appointed her replacement, but did not run for a full term.
\nBy November, California will not have a female senator for the first time in 30 years.
\nIn early results in California, it was too close to call the outcome for Proposition 1, a mental health funding ballot measure proposed by Governor Gavin Newsom to “prioritise getting people off the streets, out of tents and into treatment”. The measure had a very slight edge as of Wednesday morning, with half the votes still to be counted. Prop 1 is supported by healthcare companies, construction workers and the prison guards union and opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and disability rights advocates, who argue it would fund locked-door psychiatric institutions and involuntary treatment and take money from community programs.
\n\nOn Wednesday evening, Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón, one of the most prominent progressive prosecutors in the US, advanced to a runoff in his re-election, surviving a primary race that pit him against 11 challengers.
\nOverseeing the largest local prosecutor’s office in the country, Gascón was first elected in 2020 on a platform of reducing mass incarceration and holding police accountable for misconduct and unjust killings. In the years since, he has weathered fierce backlash from police groups and others pushing for a return to more punitive policies.
\nTo win the primary outright in California, Gascón needed to get a 50%-plus-one vote. Anything less triggers a runoff race between the top two candidates in November regardless of party.
\nNathan Hochman, a former GOP attorney general candidate and federal prosecutor, was close behind Gascón in early returns. Many of Gascón’s 11 challengers, including Hochman, have pledged to undo his reform agenda.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f6fd21f9a7bd43ed623c8c68a9b13db157051c8e/0_459_5500_3302/master/5500.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=0cc9c1af4a97d38e2eff7f153768ea8d","height":3302,"width":5500,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Representative Adam Schiff, with his wife Eve Schiff and daughter Lexi Schiff, greets his supporters at the Avalon Theater in Los Angeles, California, on Tuesday night. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"The first report from the Los Angeles police department about the killing of Jason Maccani on 3 February immediately drew scrutiny: an officer had fatally shot a man who had been “armed with a stick” and threatening people in a building on Skid Row, the department said.
\nLAPD’s update a day later raised new concerns: the 36-year-old Maccani hadn’t been holding any weapon, but rather a “white plastic fork”.
\nBody-camera footage released two weeks later raised even further questions about LAPD’s shifting narrative. The footage showed Maccani alone walking out of a unit into the building hallway, not threatening anyone, when seven officers approached with weapons drawn. The officer who fired the fatal shot opened fire within roughly 15 seconds of seeing him.
\nThe killing of Maccani has sparked national consternation, but the circumstances are not unique. In recent years, LAPD has repeatedly shot individuals holding ordinary objects that police either mistook for weapons or claimed could be dangerous. That includes two shootings of people carrying cellphones; two cases where men had lighters; and shootings of people holding, alternatively, a bike part, a car part and a wooden board.
\nThe shootings, which have cost taxpayers millions in settlements, lay bare continued flaws in how LAPD responds to calls for help, civil rights advocates and policing experts say.
\nMany of these incidents share characteristics. The people shot were often in mental distress. Officers were told 911 call information suggested they were armed. But footage of these incidents consistently shows officers failing to investigate whether the information was accurate, escalating encounters with people experiencing mental health episodes, and rushing to use lethal force without clearly communicating with the individuals or in some cases other officers.
\nIn Maccani’s case, a 911 caller reported a “homeless dude” had entered his studio in a warehouse building in Skid Row, an area known for its large unhoused population. The intruder was “tweaking out”, “very dangerous” and had a “stick” or “pole”, the caller said, according to LAPD. A dispatcher radioed in the incident as an “assault with a deadly weapon”, saying the man was “armed with a large stick”, “under the influence” and “attacking an employee”.
\nBody-camera excerpts from two officers show seven officers crowding into a narrow hallway of the building and shouting at Maccani to come forward.
\nMaccani initially appears calm and holding his hands up, following commands to walk backward toward police, the footage shows. He then turns and starts walking forward, at which point one officer fires a beanbag, a less-lethal foam projectile. The footage then captures a chaotic scuffle, with Macanni screaming as several officers grab him and one fires a bullet.
\nAs officers handcuff Maccani face down, one can be heard asking: “Did anyone shoot?” When the shooter, identified by LAPD as officer Caleb Garcia-Alamilla, responds: “I did,” the first officer asks: “You shot lethal?” Garcia-Alamilla responds that he shot Maccani in the arm, but the medical examiner later said he had been hit in the chest. Garcia-Alamilla was hired less than a year ago and was on probationary status.
\nLAPD Capt Kelly Muniz claimed in a briefing that Maccani had “charged” at officers and grabbed their beanbag shotgun, but the video doesn’t clearly show that. The spokesperson also said officers had believed the fork was a “screwdriver” or “knife”. Muniz declined an interview request and did not respond to questions, but said in an email that LAPD “conducts a significant amount of training surrounding the use of force, particularly deadly force”.
\n“It’s a failure to de-escalate, a failure to recognize a mental health crisis and an unnecessary use of deadly force,” said Dale Galipo, an attorney representing Maccani’s family in a wrongful death claim against the city. He said it may have been a case of “contagious fire”, where the beanbag firing triggered another officer to fire his gun, which all happened in seconds: “It’s bad training and overreaction.”
\n\nMike Maccani said that his brother, who had been living with his aunt and was not unhoused, sometimes struggled with mental illness, experiencing occasional episodes where he’d get over-excited or go on indecipherable tangents: “It only happened every few years, but he was never violent or agitated. He’d just be hyper. We were never scared. He was a goofball.”
\nHe said he didn’t know why his brother was in that building, but added: “It’s not lost on me that this shooting took place on Skid Row, an area with high rates of homelessness, drug use and mental illness, where people are over-policed and victims of police brutality.”
\n“[LAPD’s] story keeps changing, and the details get more frustrating and sad, but it doesn’t change the end result,” he said. “That’s what hurts the most. Jason was experiencing a mental health crisis and he was killed in his moment of greatest need.”
\nThere have been reform efforts across the US meant to reduce lethal force over the last decade, but overall police in America continue to kill more people every year. In the last two years,police in Denver shot someone holding a marker; an officer in Columbus, Ohio, shot someone holding a vape pen; and in Harford county, Maryland, officers killed someone holding a cane.
\nSeveral experts said that is in part because of how police are trained. “The law enforcement identity creates a way of seeing things – where cellphones look like guns, cars look like weapons, poverty looks like criminality,” said James Nolan, a West Virginia University sociology professor and former police officer. “It’s a hypervigilance for danger and it puts both the police and community in danger.”
\n“Training is centered on all the possible threats – that anything can be used as a weapon, anything can kill you, and it can happen so quickly that officers who don’t assert control are vulnerable,” said Christopher Bou Saeed, an LA civil rights lawyer.
\nMore tragedies could be prevented if there were a focus on alternative responses to people in crisis, said Bou Saeed, and if there were meaningful consequences for excessive force.
\n\nLos Angeles has paid hefty settlements, like a recent $2.35m award to a man who was shot while holding a cellphone. Bou Saeed noted a US judge’s 2022 ruling finding an LAPD officer directly liable after shooting a man who had posed no “imminent harm”, but held a piece of wood. “Holding a wooden board and refusing to drop it is insufficient by any objective measure to justify the force deployed,” the judge wrote. (Despite the personal liability ruling, the city could still foot the bill for any future settlement.)
\nParticularly agonizing to victims of these shootings and their families are LAPD’s misleading narratives and aggressive efforts to justify the use of force in the aftermath. In July 2022, two LAPD officers approached Jermaine Petit on a Leimert Park sidewalk with guns drawn, following a 911 call for a “transient” with a “gun”.
\nFootage from the incident shows Petit walking away from officers. As they give chase, one can be heard telling the other: “It’s not a gun, bro.” Seconds later, a third LAPD officer driving by in his cruiser shoots Petit from inside the vehicle. One of the officers who initially responded to the call also fires.
\nPetit was shot multiple times and suffered injuries from falling, but survived. LAPD later acknowledged he had been unarmed and was holding a small metal car part called an actuator.
\nStill, Petit was prosecuted for “brandishing a replica gun”, a charge that’s still pending. The officer who opened fire from his car was found to have violated policy, but it’s unclear whether he faced any discipline. LAPD did not respond to requests for comment.
\nPetit is a US air force veteran with severe PTSD and schizophrenia, his mother, Charlotte Blackwell, said in an interview. Since the shooting, LAPD has continued to claim Petit “pointed” the object at police, even though video shows him running away. “That video hurt my heart. How could they do that to him and then say it was his fault? … It was like a firing squad.”
\n\n“I expected the police to demonize Jermaine,” added Petit’s cousin, André Horton. “The department has its purpose – to keep a certain sect of people in line.” But Horton said it was still hard to understand why LAPD vilified Petit so aggressively immediately after shooting him: “I had this feeling of helplessness and frustration that teetered on anger.”
\nPetit’s mental illness has worsened since the shooting, Blackwell said, and he is currently missing. She fears he won’t survive his next encounter with police.
\nAs media from across the US have covered the final moments of his brother’s life, Mike Maccani says he wants to celebrate how Jason lived: “I’m the oldest, but I really looked up to Jay.”
\nThey grew up in Ventura county, north of LA, where Jason excelled at football: “He was an all-star athlete, and he could talk to anyone and become friends with anyone. It was a gift.” Jason graduated from UCLA with a mechanical engineering degree, afterward joking that “the only thing he learned in six years was he didn’t want to work with engineers”.
\nHe worked as a yoga and spin instructor and more recently drove for Uber – enjoying jobs that gave him flexibility and independence, his brother said. He also provided regular care for his grandparents in their final months, helping with daily tasks and reading to them as they started to lose their memory.
\n“He was a free spirit who liked to live life to the fullest,” said Mike, recounting fond memories of his brother and his girlfriend joining Mike at LA’s gay bars. “He’d talk to anyone who’d listen.” During the pandemic, the two would chat about social justice: “Jay had a lot of compassion for the unhoused and this system that lets people in the richest country in the world live homeless or go hungry.”
\nJason was close to all three of his siblings, and the four had planned a “sibling day” hangout for 4 February. When Jason didn’t show up, the three others took photos and joked about Photoshopping him in Jason. Soon after, Mike got the call from the medical examiner that Jason had been killed.
\nMike said Jason’s killing highlights the need for unarmed responses to people in crisis, and that officers incapable of exercising restraint should not be on the force.
\n“I hope people understand that this can happen to anyone,” he added. “He had a bachelor’s degree, a loving supportive family, he had resources, and this police brutality still happened to him. Now our family joins so many others who have needlessly lost loved ones to police violence.”
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9949e578c7cf525fba42504f304ba9ae4e92b040/5_7_1487_886/master/1487.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c10c16c99a364d60b42d7d224c1bdabd","height":886,"width":1487,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"LAPD has shot people holding a bike part (top left), a fork, a phone and a car part (bottom right). 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"A former Colorado paramedic has been sentenced to five years in prison in the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain after he was stopped by Aurora police.
\nPeter Cichuniec was one of two paramedics convicted of criminally negligent homicide for their roles in the 23-year-old’s death, which sparked years of protests and changes in the law. A jury also found Cichuniec guilty of second-degree assault. The outcome marks an extremely rare instance of a paramedic being found criminally liable and facing a prison sentence for a death in police custody.
\nCichuniec was facing a sentence of five to 16 years for the assault charge. The judge on Friday also issued a one-year sentence for the homicide count for him to serve at the same time.
\nColorado prosecutors filed charges against Cichuniec, paramedic Jeremy Cooper and three police officers, with cases that dragged on for years. Cichuniec and Cooper were responsible for injecting McClain with a dangerous dose of ketamine, a powerful sedative, as officers held him down.
\n“Should there have been a better medical assessment of Elijah McClain prior to the administration of ketamine? The answer is simply yes,” the judge, Mark Warner, said before issuing his sentence. He added: “The court does not find [Cichuniec] is an ongoing risk to the public.”
\nOn 24 August 2019, McClain, a massage therapist, was walking home from the store listening to music on his headphones when a passing driver called 911 to report a “sketchy” person who “might be a good person or a bad person”. The caller noted he did not see any weapons and did not believe anyone was in danger.
\nNathan Woodyard, the first officer to stop McClain, was immediately aggressive and grabbed him, saying he was “being suspicious”. Two other officers, Randy Roedema and Jason Rosenblatt, soon arrived and tackled McClain to the ground, placing him in a neck hold and putting their body weight on him, causing him to go in and out of consciousness.
\nMcClain, an animal lover who had taught himself violin, apologized, repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe” and also said, “I’m an introvert … Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies.”
\nCichuniec ordered ketamine from the ambulance and Cooper injected McClain with 500mg, even though 325mg would have been the appropriate dose for someone of his weight, prosecutors said.
\nMcClain showed signs of overdose following the dosage and never awoke.
\nA review of the case solicited by the Aurora city council found that McClain had committed no crime and police had no legal basis to stop him or to use force against him.
\nSheneen McClain, who sat through three lengthy trials, told the court Friday that the paramedics were “accomplices to my son’s murder” and should have cared for her son as a patient and tried to help him.
\n“They want to blame their inhuman actions on their inhuman training, but reality is that they could have done something simply by just saying, ‘Stop hurting my patient.’ Instead, they chose to make the situation worse for my son and implicated themselves ... They felt no need to stop the brutality that was happening to my son as he pleaded for his life.”
\nShe said she had repeatedly watched body-camera footage to try to understand why the paramedics “did not save him”. “Elijah was unconscious for an extended amount of time when he was held down and injected with ketamine, which made sure he did not wake up.”
\nBefore the sentencing, the former paramedic’s relatives pleaded for mercy and Cichuniec spoke at length, criticizing prosecutors for saying he showed no remorse: “Every patient is important to me and my crew, no matter what.” But he continued to defend his actions that night, saying he had to make a “split-second decision”. Addressing Sheneen McClain, he said, “I am truly sorry for the loss of her son’s life. And I wish more than anything that we had a better outcome that night.”
\nRosenblatt and Woodyard were acquitted in their trials. Woodyard was reinstated to the force in November and received more than $400,000 in back wages and other payments from the city, then resigned in January. Roedema, convicted of criminally negligent homicide, was sentenced to 14 months. Cooper’s sentencing is scheduled for April.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5a38cd686ebed7a1a375aa09eb2dd0c365a9c985/144_114_4923_2954/master/4923.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=8c83a3acaf40aa6220b97a3241975f01","height":2954,"width":4923,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"A memorial in Aurora, Colorado to Elijah McClain. 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What’s at stake if he loses?","rawTitle":"LA’s progressive district attorney faces 11 challengers in criminal justice race. What’s at stake if he loses?","item":{"id":"us-news/2024/mar/01/la-district-attorney-george-gascon-candidates-election","title":"LA’s progressive district attorney faces 11 challengers in criminal justice race. What’s at stake if he loses?","trailText":"Most of George Gascón’s opponents have promised to reverse much of his agenda for ‘a referendum on reform’","standFirst":"Most of George Gascón’s opponents have promised to reverse much of his agenda for ‘a referendum on reform’
","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney (LADA), is facing 11 challengers in a high-stakes primary next week that advocates for criminal justice reform across the US will be watching.
\nGascón was elected to oversee the US’s largest district attorney’s office in 2020, ousting a longtime incumbent after pledging to prioritize police accountability and undo harms of mass incarceration. His win, on the heels of protests of George Floyd’s murder, established him as one of the most prominent progressive prosecutors in the US.
\n\nA former LAPD officer and San Francisco police chief, Gascón has followed through on many promises of significant reforms: declining to seek the death penalty; limiting the prosecution of youth as adults; exonerating wrongfully convicted people who spent decades in prison; frequently prosecuting officers; and undoing excessively long sentences.
\nMost of Gascón’s 11 opponents – including four prosecutors in his office, former federal prosecutors and current and former judges – have promised to reverse much of his agenda.
\n“This election is much more than a referendum on my work, it’s a referendum on reform work throughout the country,” Gascón said in an interview. “A few years ago, when people ran for these offices, it was generally a ‘lock everybody up’ message. It was almost inconceivable someone would run on a platform of public safety through a more thoughtful, equitable approach … that incarceration is not the answer to every social ill, that we have to look at the wrongdoings of the past and try to correct them.”
\nOne of Gascón’s signature initiatives is a re-sentencing unit, which is aimed at giving second chances to some youth tried as adults and older people serving long prison terms. Roughly 240 people have received reduced sentences, his campaign said. None of those released have been convicted of a new offense.
\nGascón has also brought 140 cases against police for a range of crimes, and has prosecuted more officers for shootings than the office had done in the two decades prior. That includes securing the first conviction for an on-duty shooting in 20 years; Andrew Lyons, one of two deputies who fatally shot Ryan Twyman, received a 30-day sentence for assault.
\n“[Gascón] did what he could do. It’s a start,” said Chiquita Twyman, Ryan’s sister. “It took a long time for me to trust him. My brother was killed by police, and to me, [Gascón] was part of the police family. I was afraid he’d just try to make a political thing out of my brother’s death. But I learned he is a stand-up guy.”
\nTwyman said she was concerned about the ferocious resistance Gascón has faced: “Every step we take to move forward to get justice, we get thrown back five or 10 steps. He’s just trying to give us families some accountability.”
\n\nSome of Gascón’s deputy DAs have openly opposed his policies, with many supporting failed efforts to recall him in the middle of his first term. The LA police union has blamed him for high-profile retail thefts, calling it a “George Gascón crime wave”. And some victims’ families and others concerned with crime and safety have called for a return to more punitive policies.
\nHis opponents have attributed negative crime trends to Gascón, painting a dire picture of violence in LA. Last year saw a significant decrease in shootings and homicides in LA, but an uptick in property crimes amid rising car thefts. Homelessness and the fentanyl crisis continue to worsen in a humanitarian emergency that has caused anxiety and frustration among voters. Experts, however, emphasize it’s difficult to link crime rates, good or bad, to prosecutors’ policies since DAs act after crimes occur.
\n“We know that fearmongering works. Republicans have used it for generations,” said Gascón, who is frequently derided as a “woke” and “soft-on-crime” DA in New York Post and Fox News stories. “The facts and history are on our side – the challenge for us is to make sure that especially non-traditional voters who have a lot at stake in this race come out and vote.”
\nMona Sahaf, director of reshaping prosecution at the Vera Institute of Justice, a non-profit that advocates for reforms, said roughly 20% of the US population now has a reform-minded DA in their jurisdiction. Gascón is unique among those DAs because of his extensive police background: “He can’t be painted with this stripe of, ‘He’s just against the blue.’ And he’s servicing a community where there’s been a lot of harm from police and the criminal legal system, going back to Rodney King.”
\nDAs dedicated to progressive policies have faced intense opposition across the country – San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, a former public defender, was recalled after two years, while reformers in Chicago, Philadelphia and St Louis have weathered backlash and been re-elected.
\nThe majority of LA voters are undecided, according to one poll, but Jonathan Hatami, an LA prosecutor endorsed by the police union, polled the highest behind Gascón. “The majority of Angelenos feel unsafe for whatever reason – if they’ve seen it on TV or experienced it. They feel scared to wear jewelry or sit outside and drink coffee. They feel afraid to go to their car at night to open their trunk. They feel afraid to pump gas,” Hatami said. “They don’t want to go shopping at the mall because they see all the smash-and-grab burglaries.” He noted a surge in homicides at the start of Gascón’s tenure, mirroring pandemic-era trends across the country, but acknowledged violent crime had gone down.
\nHatami, who publicly criticized Gascón’s policies his first month in office, said he broadly supported Gascón’s efforts to keep youth in juvenile court and his police accountability efforts, though he said it seemed the DA had gone too far in promoting police prosecutions: “You don’t need to go in front of the media every single police case because you give the impression police are running around like criminals all over the place … and tells the police they have a different standard than everybody else.”
\n\nCandidate Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor who has touted $2m in fundraising, more than any other candidate, said he was running because Gascón’s policies amount to the “most pro-criminal directives” in LADA history. He cited Gascón’s opposition to charging “enhancements”, which lengthen defendants’ sentences based on factors like alleged gang affiliation. Gascón also opposes charging “three strikes”, which leads to life sentences for some people convicted of three felonies; enhancements have been found to exacerbate racial disparities and lead to indefinite prison terms for minor offenses, and reformers point to research suggesting more severe punishments don’t deter crime.
\n“The criminals are 100% paying attention,” Hochman said. “If you went ahead and reinstituted the filing of enhancements, you’re not going to stop violent crime overnight, but you will definitely affect the people who are watching the law,” he argued.
\nWhile the candidates have largely pledged to reject Gascón’s agenda, Jeff Chemerinsky, a former federal prosecutor, has positioned himself as the “only challenger in the race who consistently talks about the need for reform”, saying he agrees with the DA’s opposition to the death penalty. But he criticized Gascón’s implementation of reforms as being too “abrupt and inflexible” and noted his poor approval ratings:
\n“There’s a real risk that someone like a rightwinger could win and there could be a Republican district attorney. I’m running to keep this a Democrat seat.”
\nCraig Mitchell, an LA judge challenging Gascón, said he would ramp up prosecutions for drug possession in response to the addiction crisis, saying he believed an increase in arrests would get more people into treatment.
\nHochman, Chemerinsky, Hatami and Eric Siddall (another LADA prosecutor, who is endorsed by the deputy DA union), have all raised more funds than Gascón as of Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported.
\nThe other candidates are current LADA prosecutors Maria Ramirez and John McKinney; LA judge Debra Archuleta (also endorsed by the police union); David Milton, a retired judge; Lloyd “Bobcat” Masson, a deputy DA in neighboring San Bernardino; and Dan Kapelovitz, a defense attorney endorsed by the Green party.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c1932661a65f6a735df667c2c6809ce90de1a158/0_0_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=8f0e73c921bc1f84d3a502bd79233cc7","height":1800,"width":3000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"George Gascón speaks at a Los Angeles county Democratic party news conference in October 2020. 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Three years later, the city faces the fallout","standFirst":"In 2020, Troy McAlister ran into two women while on parole, fueling a campaign to undo reforms. Three years later, the city faces the fallout
","byline":"Sam Levin in San Francisco","body":"On the afternoon of 31 December 2020, as San Francisco prepared to celebrate the first New Year’s Eve of the pandemic, Troy McAlister drove a stolen car through a red light in the city’s SoMa neighborhood and hit another vehicle.
\nThe collision sent McAlister’s car crashing into two women who were crossing the street. Hanako Abe, a 27-year-old real estate analyst, and Elizabeth Platt, a 60-year-old radio DJ who was struggling with homelessness, did not survive the hit.
\n\nAs the city mourned, Platt’s radio colleagues aired tributes, and Abe’s mother traveled from Japan to San Francisco, the focus turned to McAlister’s record.
\nMcAlister had been in and out of prison since age 19. Local news reported he was arrested several times in the months leading up to the crash and was on parole for a 2015 robbery with a toy gun. That case could have seen him locked up for 25 years to life, but the office of the San Francisco district attorney (DA), Chesa Boudin, a former public defender elected on a pledge to reduce mass incarceration, agreed to his release after five years in jail.
\nBoudin, critics charged, “should have done more to keep Troy McAlister off the streets”.
\nThe crash went on to become the most politically consequential criminal matter in recent years in San Francisco: Boudin was already facing backlash from police groups opposed to his reforms and residents and business leaders who argued his efforts were exacerbating crime. The New Year’s Eve deaths helped jumpstart a successful campaign to recall him from office and shepherd in a return to more punitive policies.
\n\nThe events raise fundamental questions about the interplay of politics, public safety and the criminal legal system, highlighting how individual, exceptional tragedies can shift the trajectory of a city and its policies.
\n\nFor McAlister’s defense team, as he faces trial for vehicular manslaughter, the politicization of his record has raised major questions. For months, their client was held up as a symbol of out-of-control-crime. The new DA overseeing the case is Brooke Jenkins, a key proponent of Boudin’s recall. As an assistant DA under Boudin, she downloaded documents from McAlister’s files, including his confidential rap sheet, even though she wasn’t involved in his case – a move some experts said was unlawful. She then resigned and joined the recall, frequently citing McAlister while calling for Boudin’s ouster. After the recall, she was appointed his successor.
\n“There was a whole apparatus clearly waiting to find some case with a tragic outcome that they could make political,” said McAlister’s public defender, Scott Grant. “In a system where there are so many thousands of cases, you can always find a tragedy where some hypothetical action by police or a DA could have been different prior.”
\nAs the victims’ families grapple with what justice and accountability might look like, McAlister, now 48, said he has felt helpless watching the media storm unfold from jail. He’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming and crying, grappling with intense grief as he envisioned what Abe and Platt’s families were enduring. At the same time, he said he was overwhelmed and scared seeing pundits project an image of him “as the worst person in America”.
\n***
\nBoudin’s critics argued McAlister presented a straightforward example of why San Francisco’s criminal justice system needed a change of course. But in fact, the circumstances that led up to the New Year’s Eve crash were years in the making, and complex.
\nMcAlister grew up in Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco, an underresourced, historically Black neighborhood near the San Francisco Bay. At age four, he said, his mother fired a shot at his father when he was nearby, an incident he said normalized violence for him. His father was largely absent after that, and his mother worked two jobs to make ends meet, leaving him with little supervision.
\nMcAlister started using drugs at 13, he said, beginning a lifelong struggle with substance use and incarceration. While battling addiction and using heroin as a young teenager, he repeatedly ended up in youth jails, where he remembers long periods of solitary confinement.
\n“When you start going to jail at a young age, it doesn’t seem like a big thing to go to jail. You don’t really care,” he said. “They don’t offer you no help to get your life together – no programs, no training, no nothing.” He attended several high schools and never graduated, and by age 19, in 1995, he was convicted of second-degree robbery.
\nMcAlister was given two years in state prison and a “strike” under a newly passed “three strikes law” that established life sentences in many circumstances for people convicted of three felonies. The designation meant that if he racked up two more cases, including non-violent ones, he could be locked up indefinitely: “From that point on, no one ever took seriously the need to get him appropriate treatment,” said Grant, noting a teenage robbery today would probably be diverted out of adult court.
\nOver the next two decades, McAlister repeatedly returned to prison for drug and robbery offenses. He had no access to treatment for addiction, and each time he was incarcerated anew, his life further unraveled: “San Francisco is supposed to be a place where everyone has chances and alternatives, but that never happened for me, not once. It was always prison, prison, prison,” McAlister said. He had four children and says he did his best to stay in contact with them while imprisoned.
\n\nIn July 2015, McAlister was jailed after robbing cashiers at a market, threatening them with a toy “airsoft” gun. By December, he was approved to be placed in a residential treatment program to tackle his addiction, but a judge denied his release, and he spent the next four years waiting in jail for a trial.
\nWhen Boudin took over the DA’s office in 2020, a prosecutor on the case followed Boudin’s new policy of generally not pursuing three strikes or other sentencing enhancements based on a defendant’s past, but rather prosecuting only the offense at hand. The directive, Boudin said in a recent interview with the Guardian, was based on evidence showing the three-strikes law greatly worsened racial disparities, led to many life sentences for minor offenses at a great economic cost to the state, and had little to no public safety benefit.
\nBoudin’s policy allowed for strikes to be considered in exceptional cases, but, Boudin recently noted, McAlister had a positive jail record after working in the laundry room, earning a high school diploma while incarcerated and securing letters of recommendation from jail staff. The maximum sentence for McAlister’s robbery charge was five years, the length of time he’d been in jail without a trial. So the DA’s office negotiated a plea agreement for the time he’d already served. A judge approved it, and McAlister walked free in March 2020 as the country was going into lockdown and as there was a push across the state to reduce jail populations due to Covid-19 risks.
\nHe was placed in a re-entry home and he repeatedly asked his parole officer for access to drug treatment. But amid pandemic shutdowns, no help materialized, McAlister said.
\nDaroya McAlister, his daughter, said she and her grandmother had tried to help him get a job but he hadn’t had professional support. “He kept applying and went to interviews, but he had no experience. He felt like the world was against him,” she said. “He was trying really hard to get clean.”
\nThen in August, McAlister was shot in the leg while out on the street – he says he doesn’t know by whom, or why. He looked into applying for victim’s compensation – state financial aid for survivors of violence – but gave up once he learned he couldn’t receive assistance while on parole. His substance use worsened in the aftermath, he said. He was arrested several times in the succeeding months on suspicion of thefts and drug possession.
\nWhat would follow was a series of communication breakdowns and law enforcement missteps that saw McAlister fall through the cracks. Boudin’s office repeatedly referred his cases to parole agents, who could have revoked parole and sent him to jail or instituted restrictions such as an ankle monitor. But it’s unclear if the parole department followed up. The DA did not file new charges after those arrests because, his office determined at the time, there was not enough evidence in those cases. Parole, it said, was better positioned to handle the situation.
\nA week before the crash, an assistant DA asked a San Francisco police official to alert the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) to McAlister’s most recent arrest, presumably to consider revoking his parole. But the San Francisco police department official was on vacation, the San Francisco Chronicle later reported. On 29 December, McAlister was identified as a suspect in vehicle theft in Daly City, just outside San Francisco. Officers contacted the parole department and attempted to locate him over the next two days but were unsuccessful, a Daly City police spokesperson said. SFPD did not respond to inquiries.
\nOn New Year’s Eve, police say, McAlister robbed a bakery before driving across the city in the stolen vehicle.
\n***
\nHanako Abe grew up in Fukushima, Japan, and came to the US to go to college in Kentucky. During a vacation to San Francisco, she fell in love with the city, said her mother, Hiroko Abe. “She was left with a strong impression that people in San Francisco seemed to be really enjoying life,” Hiroko said in a recent interview, speaking through an interpreter.
\n“In Japan, people are all work, but I really wanted my daughter to have that opportunity to find a balance between work and having fun, so I was very supportive.”
\n\nHanako relocated to San Francisco in 2018. In college, she had avoided befriending Japanese people to force herself to learn English, her mother said, but once in San Francisco, where she worked at commercial real estate firm JLL, she found a community of Japanese American friends. Highly athletic, she joined a running club, went on hikes and did horseback riding. During the pandemic, she took to weightlifting, often showing her mom her ab muscles on Zoom calls: “She was so full of joyful exuberance, often quite hilarious, too,” Hiroko laughed. She was very driven, too. When her mother entered her daughter’s apartment after her death, she found that she kept an essay she’d written in elementary school on her desk that said, “‘I want to be loved by everyone.’”
\nElizabeth Platt, the older victim in the crash, too, was drawn to San Francisco at a young age, said her sister, Alison Platt, in an interview. Liz, who grew up on a farm in rural Michigan, loved the movies The Love Bug and What’s Up, Doc?, both set in the city. She moved to San Francisco in the late 1970s when she was about 18 and never looked back.
\n“What she liked about San Francisco was that it was probably more Marxist than other places – she loved the hippy lifestyle,” Alison said. “She had a romantic notion of San Francisco in the 60s.”
\nPlatt lived in communal housing for years, her sister said, and was active in peace protests and efforts to support civil rights in Ireland, a commitment that grew out of her love for Irish punk music. She worked as a typist for Wells Fargo in the 80s, but rarely had steady or stable housing or employment after that, Alison said. As a DJ for the community radio station KXSF, she was known as the Battleaxe. In her final years, she had been partially living on the street, at times sleeping at the airport or in booths at all-night coffee places. She was angry about the tech boom, Alison said, and the gentrification of some of the city’s neighborhoods.
\n***
\nDays after the crash, Boudin charged McAlister with vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, leaving the scene of an accident, unlawfully taking a car and other counts.
\n“Although of course no one predicted this tragedy, it is true that the Daly City police, the San Francisco police, parole and my office all could have done things differently, which might have avoided this terrible outcome,” he said in a statement at the time.
\nMeanwhile, Boudin’s opponents sprang into action. The San Francisco police union, which had fiercely opposed Boudin’s election, directly faulted him for the tragedy: “Two people were killed on New Year’s Eve because Chesa Boudin refused to do his job, which is to hold criminals and victimizers accountable,” the union president said in a 4 January press release. The union’s “Boudin Blunders” website, which it had launched in Boudin’s first month in office, featured McAlister at the top, saying the DA allowed him to “keep terrorizing our city”.
\nSome prominent tech leaders who had been advocating for more aggressive and punitive responses to homelessness and crime in the city mobilized, too. On 2 January, Jason Calacanis, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, launched a GoFundMe to “Hold the DA of SF accountable” and “hire an investigative journalist to cover Chesa’s office”. On 5 January, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and Elon Musk ally, published a blogpost titled “The Killer DA”, which said Boudin had given McAlister a “sweetheart deal” in 2020.
\nThat week, Richie Greenberg, a former GOP candidate for mayor, launched an online petition to recall Boudin from office. He soon launched a formal committee to get a recall measure on the ballot.
\nGreenberg’s recall failed to gather enough signatures, but a second recall group launched in April 2021, calling itself San Franciscans for Public Safety and featuring some Democratic leaders. The group, which cited McAlister’s case in its filing notice, argued that Boudin had the “wrong priorities”, did not care about victims and that his policies were contributing to burglaries, violence and the overdose crisis.
\n\nA year into his tenure, it was impossible to draw any reliable empirical conclusions about the impact of his policies on crime rates, said Kimberly Richman, chair of the sociology department at the University of San Francisco. But Boudin, the son of two leftist radicals who spent decades in prison, had worked years as a public defender and unlike many district attorneys, had no ties to law enforcement and had faced fierce critics from the start.
\nMeanwhile, the mood in San Francisco was grim. Businesses were struggling amid the pandemic, and homelessness and the crises of mental illness and substance use were becoming increasingly visible on the streets. As was the case elsewhere in the country, the city saw an increase in gun violence, homicides and other offenses in 2021. It was plagued in particular by reports of car break-ins, growing concerns over anti-Asian violence, and viral incidents of seemingly random assaults and “brazen” thefts. The narrative that the liberal city was out of control was repeatedly amplified by rightwing media. Critics increasingly pointed at the DA. The New Year’s tragedy became a flashpoint for resentment.
\n“It was the perfect storm,” Richman said. “He was a former public defender. He had sympathies for people with incarcerated parents … For some of us, that’s what made him a breath of fresh air – that he had a different background and perspective. But for others, it was an automatic source of distrust, and it didn’t take much to tip that balance even more.”
\nThe randomness of the New Year’s collision aligned with people’s fears in a powerful way, added Anjuli Verma, a University of California, Santa Cruz, politics professor. “The imagery of this car crashing played into this idea of chaos in the city. It’s not as if Troy McAlister meant to run over these women, but it was like: here is a person who is out of control in an out-of-control city, with an out-of-control DA.”
\n***
\nIn October 2021, six months after the recall effort was filed, Brooke Jenkins, a former homicide prosecutor and then an assistant DA under Boudin, accessed documents from McAlister’s files, including his rap sheet, according to the local news site Mission Local. She sent them to the personal email account of Don du Bain, another prosecutor in the office. Neither was involved in the case.
\nThe move, several experts said, appeared to be illegal. “Improperly distributing a confidential rap sheet is not just a policy violation, it’s a misdemeanor … it is very serious,” said Steve Wagstaffe, the longtime DA of neighboring San Mateo. He said he couldn’t assess Jenkins’ liability without knowing her explanation for downloading the files, but Jenkins has declined to address why she took them.
\nOne week after Jenkins emailed the records to Du Bain, however, they both resigned, and soon after announced they had joined the recall campaign.
\nIn a local TV interview that month, they cited McAlister’s 2015 plea agreement. “Those women are not alive today because of that very abrupt and reckless decision that Chesa made to release Troy McAlister,” Du Bain said. Jenkins said: “Boudin lacks the desire and willingness to prosecute crime effectively in San Francisco.”
\nBy November, recall organizers had earned enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. Jenkins had become one of the most prominent spokespeople for the recall. (She also made $153,000 consulting for a non-profit affiliated with the recall campaign while calling herself a “volunteer”.) And in subsequent months, she continued to bring up the McAlister case.
\n“[McAlister] should have never been out in the first place,” she said at a May 2022 recall rally a month before the vote. In a KQED radio interview that month, she and Du Bain argued again that releasing McAlister had been a mistake. “It’s not so much that Chesa decided to execute a plea deal. It’s what deal he executed,” Jenkins said. “It needs to be one that’s proportionate to your criminal history and your current crime, and it needs to also put you in a position not to reoffend.”
\n\nWeeks before the vote, the recall campaign released an emotional ad featuring Abe’s mother. “I know in my heart Hanako Abe would be alive today if Chesa Boudin properly handled the Troy McAlister case,” Hiroko said in the clip.
\nOn 7 June, San Franciscans voted to recall Boudin, with 55% in favor of his ouster. Mayor London Breed appointed Jenkins as the interim DA. Jenkins promptly rehired Du Bain.
\nJenkins continued to cite McAlister as she campaigned for a full term. “There’s been a spike in crimes committed by repeat offenders and a rise in violent crimes, sadly exemplified by [McAlister],” she said on her website. Her new bail policy was meant to avoid a similar tragedy, she told reporters.
\nOn 8 November 2022, Jenkins was elected for a full term.
\n***
\nThere is a long tradition of American politicians and law enforcement officials pointing at specific criminal cases in political campaigns or to push for an expansion of prisons and police powers. Some have called it the “Willie Horton effect” – the tactic that even if a reform is successful overall, one high-profile failure can undo it.
\nThe dynamic was named for the politicization of the case of William Horton, an incarcerated Black man in Massachusetts, convicted of raping a white woman after failing to return to prison while on a furlough in 1987. The following year, the then presidential candidate George HW Bush repeatedly blamed the crime on his rival in the race, Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor at the time of Horton’s furlough, and a campaign ad stoked racist fears about crime.
\nIn California, the 1993 kidnapping and murder of the 12-year-old Polly Klaas by a man with a violent criminal record fueled the passage of the “three strikes” law.
\nIn 2015, the then candidate Donald Trump used the killing of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco to advocate for a broad crackdown on immigrants.
\nAs DA, Jenkins has undone many of Boudin’s reforms – rescinding the prosecutions in three police shooting cases, reversing efforts to overturn wrongful convictions and long sentences, and sending more people to jail and prison. It’s a trend opponents of reform-minded DAs in other California jurisdictions would like to see take place this year as well. Progressive district attorneys in Los Angeles and Oakland are facing major challenges from opponents pushing a similar message to Jenkins’.
\n\nGrant said he hadn’t been surprised to see McAlister’s criminal record being used by the recall campaign. But, he said, in his 15 years as a public defender, he knew of no other case in which a DA had staked a significant part of a political campaign on an individual case – and then took over prosecution of the matter: “She has made her career and has continued to fundraise and campaign on the back of Troy McAlister,” he said, noting that the story remains on her website where she solicits donations.
\nJenkins’ frequent citations of McAlister’s case on the campaign trail have raised eyebrows among some legal observers as well. “Even if it’s legally allowed for a DA to stay on a case despite statements made on the campaign trail, the question is what happens to the credibility of the system and the credibility of the conviction?” said Mona Sahaf, director of reshaping prosecution at the Vera Institute of Justice, a non-profit that advocates for reforms.
\nIn a system where DAs run for office, the risk of harmful political influence on their decisions is great, she added.
\nProsecutors risk prejudicing juries when they make a political story out of an ongoing case, said Kami Chavis, director of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Reform at William & Mary Law School: “She based her political career on this … but the ultimate goal should be for justice in a case. Anytime you have these other political considerations, that is in danger of being sacrificed.”
\nFrom jail in San Bruno, McAlister said he was saddened by Jenkins’ use of his story, and wondered what it meant for his fate: “How am I going to get a fair trial? She is going to do everything she can to make sure that she can use me as a ‘victory’, and that I never get out of jail.”
\nMcAlister has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could face more than 20 years in prison.
\nJenkins declined repeated interview requests and did not respond to detailed questions.
\n***
\nAs McAlister’s case moves closer towards a trial, the families of the two victims are preparing for its resolution.
\nAlison Platt, who lives in New Mexico, said she had struggled to process the news of her sister’s death when she got a call from the coroner’s office. As reporters started calling, she also questioned the political narrative being pushed in her sister’s name.
\n“It was very overwhelming,” she said. Calls for three strikes or a “tough on crime” escalation did not seem to align with her sister’s progressive values, she said: “I think she’d really bristle at the idea of a crackdown or anything authoritarian or what she’d see as oppressors and the prison-industrial complex.”
\nAlison said she was significantly more concerned that the parole department seemed to have dropped the ball than with the decisions made by Boudin’s office, but that few seemed interested in accountability for that agency, which is not run by an elected official.
\nMary Xjimenez, a CDCR spokesperson, said in an email that the parole division had made the “appropriate referrals” to ensure “resources” were available to help “McAlister’s re-entry in the community”. Parole officials “followed all procedures including conducting investigations and holding Mr McAlister accountable by applying sanctions”, she said. She did not specify what resources had been offered or what sanctions had been applied.
\nAlison also said she was sympathetic to the claims of McAlister’s team that he should have gotten help earlier.
\n“Conservatives say: ‘These people have proven time and time again that they can’t reform their conduct, so why don’t we just lock them up for ever?’ But we’re not giving them any resources to change, so it seems like that’s where the focus should be.”
\n\nShe believes Liz wouldn’t want McAlister to be locked up for life and would support him getting treatment.
\nWhen Hiroko, Hanako’s mother, got the call about her daughter’s death, she initially didn’t understand what had happened. “I thought this was just an ordinary unfortunate accident, that this was not preventable.” But she was disturbed to later learn of McAlister’s criminal record from a reporter, and she felt as if officials had not given her the full story: “It seemed Mr McAlister had been released a number of times without being reformed or having a chance to reflect on his life. It started to look more and more to me that, even though Mr McAlister did not have any premeditation or plan to kill Hanako, there was possibly prosecutorial error.”
\nThe system, she felt, had not given him a chance to improve and fix his life each time he committed a minor offense: “I felt Boudin took away an opportunity for Mr McAlister to become a better and more productive person, and that’s why I was willing to cooperate with the recall efforts.”
\nHiroko said she didn’t want to see “superficial solutions” but reforms that tackle the drug crisis, the influence of money on politics, and other social problems: “The way I see it is that McAlister is also the victim of the political system, and unless the people of San Francisco address the root cause of the problem, no change for good in public policy can happen.”
\nTwo years later, she said, she still hopes McAlister gets help.
\n“Rehabilitation and reformation has to happen, and Mr McAlister cannot repeat his mistakes. There should be no more victims of Mr McAlister. If those conditions are met, I would support Mr McAlister returning to society.”
\nMcAlister said he hoped to someday get an opportunity to prove that he is more than the person depicted in political ads. “Nothing I can say could change what happened or make things better. It’s impossible. I can’t blame society, my mom or anybody. If I could change it, I would, but I can’t. What I can do is try to get my life together and make an impact.”
\nThis article was amended on 27 February 2024 to provide additional context about the Willie Horton case.
More than 2,000 people died in 2023, with a decade of autopsy data uncovering escalating humanitarian catastrophe
","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles and Will Craft in New York","body":"More than 2,000 unhoused people died in Los Angeles in 2023, meaning an average of nearly six deaths a day of people living on the street or in shelters in the nation’s most populous county.
\nThe numbers reveal an escalating humanitarian emergency as the housing crisis and drug addiction epidemic collide, with victims found in tents, encampments, vehicles, parks, alleys, vacant lots, underpasses, bus stops and train stations.
\n\nAn exclusive review of LA county medical examiner data obtained by the Guardian shows the department logged a total of 11,573 deaths of unhoused people over the last decade. Deaths have consistently increased every year.
\nIn 2023, 2,033 people died, a staggering 291% increase from the 519 cases recorded in 2014 and an 8% increase from the 1,883 fatalities in 2022.
\nThe data is an undercount as the medical examiner only has jurisdiction over deaths considered violent, sudden or unusual, or where the deceased has not recently seen a doctor, meaning the scale of the crisis is greater than what’s captured in the data.
\nThe LA county public health department does its own tracking, and a spokesperson said its researchers estimate there are roughly 20% more deaths in its database due to its more comprehensive sources and methodologies. The health department has not yet released 2023 data.
\n“Every single death takes a toll on you,” said Rebecca Chavez, 41, who is part of a community of unhoused people that suffered two recent losses in the San Fernando Valley region of LA. Both victims had lived in encampments with her over the years and she considered them family, she said. One died of an overdose while she was nearby, and she said she was haunted by the memory of being unable to revive him: “I don’t know how I’ll ever recover.”
\nThe 2023 autopsy reports illustrate the myriad challenges facing unhoused people: the rise in fentanyl, untreated mental and physical illness, a lack of access to affordable housing and high rates of violence. A man was arrested last year for allegedly targeting and killing three unhoused men in LA who were sleeping.
\n\nThe alarming death rate comes as LA residents continue to fall into homelessness faster than people on the streets are moved into housing. The county now has more than 75,500 unhoused people, according to the 2023 point-in-time survey, a rough estimate. LA also has one of the highest rates in the nation of people living outside, with 73% of its unhoused population classified as “unsheltered”, meaning living in tents, cars and makeshift structures. In New York City, by comparison, an estimated 5% of the unhoused population is unsheltered, with most in emergency shelters.
\nThe data analysis laid bare other trends:
\nOver the past decade, 6,720 deaths (58% of deaths) were classified as “accidental”, including overdoses and traffic deaths; 3,157 (27%) were ruled “natural”, including heart disease and pneumonia; 801 (7%) were homicides; and 444 (4%) were deaths by suicide.
The data shows a dramatic increase in fentanyl-related deaths over time, with 30 cases listing the powerful opioid as the cause of death in 2018; 255 in 2020; and 633 in 2022. For 2023, the medical examiner has logged 575 fentanyl deaths so far, but it typically takes three months for drug-related deaths to have their causes finalized, and hundreds of deaths are still under investigation.
Black Angelenos make up only 9% of the overall county, but accounted for 25% of all unhoused deaths from 2014 to 2023 (2,945 deaths). Latinos made up 35% of deaths (4,062 cases); white people comprised 35% (4,052 cases); and Asian Americans comprised 2% (198 cases).
The most common age at death was 55 to 60, though there were 29 children under the age of 10, and 63 people over 80 who died while unhoused since 2014.
“We’re seeing older adults throughout the county who are just unable to pay rent,” said Dr Absalon Galat, the medical director for the county’s mobile clinic program. People in their 70s are unable to afford housing after retirement and end up living in vehicles or on the streets, he said: “Some say: ‘I’m just going to live here temporarily’ … but then they get stuck out there. Their medical problems are the last thing they think about. They’re trying to survive in this new environment – it’s: ‘How do I get warm at night? How do I get food?’”
\nChronic diseases that they were managing before homelessness can go untreated and become life-threatening, Galat said.
\n“Almost everybody on the street knows somebody who has overdosed – a friend or someone in their community. So death is always present,” said Brett Feldman, the director of USC street medicine and who also treats unhoused patients. “Nobody wants to be addicted to fentanyl. They’re usually trying to escape their reality and the suffering on the street, and many started using drugs to deaden the pain of homelessness.
\n“On a daily basis, they might be using the same thing that killed their friend and not knowing when they might be next,” Feldman added. When his staff gathers twice a month for team meetings, they have a moment of silence for patients they have lost; these days, they are honoring five to 10 people a month.
\nVictor Hinderliter, LA county health services’ director of street-based engagement and mobile clinics, said more frequent and severe weather events are also endangering people outside, including storms, flooding, wildfires, high winds and heatwaves.
\n\nIn Van Nuys, just north of Los Angeles, a group of unhoused residents mourned the death of Anjileen Swan last month. Swan, 54, had long struggled with homelessness and had repeatedly been hospitalized last year for congestive heart failure and other problems, her friends said.
\n“I took care of her, and there were a lot of people looking out for her,” said Giselle Harrell, 40, who lives in a tent in the area. “But she needed a lot of help with everything.”
\nSwan’s friends said she had a housing placement at the start of last year, but was evicted for unclear reasons. Although she later got a bed in a motel shelter program, she lost that spot, too, amid her hospitalizations, they said.
\nIn a video filmed by community organizer Carla Orendorff in October, Swan is in her tent as Los Angeles police department and city workers prepare to sweep her area, which was being subjected to a targeted enforcement effort. Swan says that she has just gotten out of the hospital from open-heart surgery and can’t move her stuff in the 15-minute timeframe they have cited. “I’m still trying to work with the people who housed me to begin with and see why they can’t put me back inside. They want me to start all over,” she says.
\nOn 11 January, another organizer records Swan’s conversation with an outreach worker, in which she says she’d been struggling in the frigid weather: “I thought I was gonna die. I was crying, like I can’t do this.”
\nFive days later, on 16 January, she died on a nearby street. The medical examiner has not yet released her cause of death.
\n“She was dealing with an incredible amount of stress,” said Orendorff. “It’s really tough, because she was an elder a lot of us looked up to.”
\nHarrell said that Swan was known for bringing clothes and food to others on the street before she became sick, but the crackdown on encampments had dispersed their community: “With the displacement and sweeps, we can’t catch a break. They are isolating and killing more people.”
\nChavez said Swan would watch her dog when she had appointments and looked out for her over the years. She called her “Mama Green Eyes”.
\nChavez added that she had grown accustomed to trying to revive people who have become unconscious: “It’s become normal to me, but nobody should ever have to be used to this.”
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2e84a9746656eb2a05af23128ebd306920e851d3/0_0_6720_4480/master/6720.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=5c177cd740313ffcef7faf3098aed26d","height":4480,"width":6720,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Rue Ryan, 32, puts together a memorial for her old friend in December 2022. Photograph: Photograph: Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images","credit":"Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images","altText":"A white woman with long blond hair wearing a backwards baseball cap sits amid drying bouquets of red and pink roses on a dirty sidewalk with graffiti on the walls behind her.","cleanCaption":"Rue Ryan, 32, puts together a memorial for her old friend in December 2022.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images"}],"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/286bc9302742f93aa6f05c72ede7b548dff1d884/0_353_4032_2514/master/4032.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=47b1d61caec121b8e07cf6f20fff1414","height":2514,"width":4032,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Anjileen Swan at one of her camping spots in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles, a few months before her death. Photograph: Photograph: Courtesy of Carla Orendorff","credit":"Courtesy of Carla Orendorff","altText":"An elderly woman lying on a bed on on the road. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"Institutional failures and policy violations by the US Bureau of Prisons (BoP) have contributed to hundreds of preventable deaths of incarcerated people in recent years, according to a federal watchdog report released on Thursday.
\n\nThe US justice department office of the inspector general (OIG) found that from 2014 to 2021, 187 people died by suicide inside BoP institutions, with the prisons’ psychology services staff reporting that these types of deaths could be prevented if the facilities followed protocols and delivered proper resources and treatment to people in custody. The report also documented 89 homicides and 56 deaths deemed “accidental” during that time period, and said the BoP consistently failed to effectively discipline staff for misconduct that contributed to the deaths.
\nThe scathing report by Michael Horowitz, the DoJ inspector general, paints a picture of a systemic and worsening crisis, and highlights the high-profile 2018 killing of the mobster James “Whitey” Bulger and the 2019 suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. Both deaths were deemed preventable and blamed in part on staff negligence and misconduct. The findings add to escalating concerns about human rights violations within the BoP after the US Senate found that staff have sexually abused women in custody in at least two-thirds of facilities, with some victims abused for months or years.
\nThe inspector general reviewed a total of 344 deaths, finding that 2021 was the deadliest year in the period analyzed, with 57 fatalities, compared with 38 in 2014. Deaths by suicide were most common, making up 54% of deaths in the eight-year period. Stressors that contributed to those deaths include mental health struggles, deaths of loved ones, planned transfers to a different institution, deportation risk, lack of family support and sex offender status, the OIG reported.
\nMore than half of those who died by suicide were isolated in “single-cell confinement” despite well-documented risks of housing people in solitary. The OIG found deficiencies and missed prevention opportunities in more than 40% of deaths by suicide, citing a case in which a person with previous suicide attempts was deprived of personal property items “documented as being important to his ability to cope with living in [solitary]”.
\nThe majority of people who died by suicide had also been classified as the lowest level of mental health needs before their deaths, meaning they were “not required to receive any regular mental health services or to have a treatment plan”. In at least 68 deaths by suicide, the BoP reported that its staff had also failed to complete required rounds; in restrictive housing units, staff are supposed to check on incarcerated people twice in an hour.
\nThe OIG further said that more than 70% of prisons provided no evidence that they had completed required “mock suicide drills”, which are intended to improve emergency response.
\nMore broadly, the OIG found consistent failures in staff response to a range of medical emergencies; in nearly half of all 344 deaths, the OIG documented “significant shortcomings”, including “a lack of urgency in emergency response, failure to bring or use appropriate emergency equipment [and] unclear radio communications”.
\nThe report found there were 78 deaths in which there were problems with defibrillators, including cases where staff did not bring the devices to the emergency, could not locate them or the devices malfunctioned. In 28 deaths, staff did not bring or properly deploy gurneys for transport, the report said.
\nThere were at least 70 drug overdose deaths during that time period, 45 classified as accidental and 17 ruled suicides. Despite the continuing drug crisis behind bars, staff were hesitant to administer naloxone in a timely manner to potentially reverse opioid overdoses, the OIG found. Guards trained to use naloxone were “uncomfortable” doing so, medical staff told the OIG.
\nThe report probably does not capture the full extent of problems that have contributed to preventable deaths. The OIG noted a range of shortcomings in how the BoP gathers and maintains evidence after a death, and that the agency only conducts “in-depth” reviews after suicides.
\nIn 117 cases, the BoP could not produce death certificates for the OIG.
\nThe report recommends training reforms, better strategies to assign mental health classifications and improvements to record-keeping and post-death investigations.
\nThe report comes amid growing scrutiny of medical neglect in prisons and jails across the US, which has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. Lawsuits have repeatedly uncovered cases in which incarcerated people begged for medical attention and were denied basic care before their deaths and there is a growing crisis of ageing and elderly people languishing behind bars.
\nScott Taylor, a BoP spokesperson, said in a statement that the bureau “acknowledge[s] the tragic nature of unexpected deaths among those in our care”, adding: “Our priority is addressing the unique health challenges, including mental health, faced by individuals in custody, particularly those with a higher incidence of substance-use disorders. We are committed to suicide prevention, substance-use disorder treatment, and combating contraband.”
\nBoP “concurs with the need for improvements”, including enhancing its mental healthcare classifications and is “dedicated to implementing these changes to ensure the safety and wellbeing of those in our custody”, Taylor added.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0ad0b609c437c56e4d16ae11f8de5d4b9fe741e0/0_0_4000_2665/master/4000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=139c240db3ce6a5147c2a73c58cf0c40","height":2665,"width":4000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"The federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 2020. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"Landslides in southern California have raised concerns about three multimillion-dollar luxury homes on the edge of the cliff side.
\nDramatic photos and videos of three properties in Dana Point in Orange county show that dirt and rocks on the bluff slid down to the shore below during the recent torrential rainstorms, giving the appearance that the homes were now precariously dangling at the very edge of the cliff.
\nBut Lewis Bruggeman, an owner of one of the homes, told local news station KCAL that there was no reason to be alarmed, saying his house was “not threatened”. He also said the property had not been “red-tagged”, meaning there was no order to evacuate the home and officials did not consider the properties at risk of falling to the shore.
\n\n“The city agrees that there’s no major structural issue with the house right now,” Bruggeman said, according to KCAL.
\nThe landslide removed greenery that was at the edge of Bruggeman’s home, the Los Angeles Times reported, noting that his property is a 9,700-sq-ft compound with an estimated value of nearly $16m. The rocks and debris from the landslide landed below near Dana Point’s tide pools.
\nMike Killebrew, Dana Point’s city manager, told KCAL that the city’s geotechnical engineer visited the site and confirmed “there is no imminent threat”. And the mayor, Jamey Federico, told the LA Times: “Quite frankly, it looks a lot scarier than it really is.”
\nLast year, two dozen people were ordered to flee their oceanside homes in San Clemente, another Orange county city, during major storms that caused the ground below them to crumble.
\nSea level rise and increasing rainfall mean these types of threats will become more common, Kate Huckelbridge, executive director of the California Coastal Commission told the LAist news site: “The combination of those two phenomena are destabilizing some of our coastal cliffs and I think landslides on bluffs like these are, unfortunately, likely to become more common.”
\nThe climate crisis is making storms costlier and deadlier, and this month’s storms left nine people dead and led LA to experience half of its annual rainfall in days. The storms also caused an estimated $11bn in damages.
\nMore rain is in the southern California forecast, arriving by late Sunday night and possibly lasting into Wednesday.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d6a8a9ca831fd0fd1bda2f72a8eec3278d298328/0_0_4000_2666/master/4000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=d9440fb9b581bea43497eef1d62ff169","height":2666,"width":4000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Cliff-top houses along Scenic Drive sit close to a landslide in Dana Point, California, on 13 February 2024. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"A Mississippi prison denied medical treatment to an incarcerated woman with breast cancer, allowing her condition to go undiagnosed for years until it spread to other parts of her body and became terminal, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday.
\nSusie Balfour, 62, alleges that Mississippi department of corrections (MDOC) medical officials were aware she might have cancer as early as May 2018, but did not conduct a biopsy until November 2021, one month before she was released from prison. It was not until January 2022, after she left an MDOC facility, that a University of Mississippi Medical Center doctor diagnosed her with stage four breast cancer, according to her federal complaint.
\n\nHer lawsuit and medical records paint a picture of a prison healthcare system that deliberately delayed life-saving healthcare and for years repeatedly failed to conduct follow-up appointments that the MDOC’s contracted clinicians recommended.
\nAdvocates for incarcerated people in Mississippi say Balfour’s experience is common. Her lawyers allege there are at least 15 others incarcerated at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, her former prison, who have cancer and are not receiving necessary treatment.
\n“I want to hold them accountable for what they’ve done to me,” Balfour said in an interview last week from her home in Memphis. “Being alone in there, I feared I was going to die, because I’ve seen so many others dying from not being able to get the proper care they needed.”
\nHer suit alleges cruel and unusual punishment and was filed against a number of MDOC contractors, including Wexford Health Sources and Centurion Health, private healthcare firms that have faced controversies over their treatment of incarcerated patients in Mississippi.
\nBalfour’s concerns about potential breast cancer began when her prison gave her a mammogram in June 2011; her doctor said it showed “benign appearing … microcalcifications in both breasts” and recommended a one-year follow-up screening, records show.
\nBut Wexford, the medical services contractor at her prison at the time, did not schedule another screening until January 2013, even as she frequently complained of pain, tenderness and “lumps” in her breasts, her complaint says. In 2013, her doctor wrote that the mammogram again showed “benign-appearing calcifications” and recommended additional testing to determine if there might be lesions, her files show.
\nWexford, however, conducted no follow-up evaluation, and it wasn’t until January 2016, three years later, that she got another mammogram with Centurion now overseeing MDOC healthcare, her complaint says. This time, doctors reported the number of calcifications had increased and recommended a six-month follow-up, but she says she wasn’t seen again for more than two years.
\n\nDuring her subsequent mammograms in May 2018, November 2019 and March 2021, doctors continually noted increasing calcifications, but still deemed them “probably benign”. Balfour’s lawyers, however, say that the doctors’ billing records indicate they were providing services related to “malignant neoplasm in breast”, suggesting they may have already detected cancer. The doctors also repeatedly noted that their benign findings “should not discourage follow-up or biopsy”. It was not until November 2021 that she actually received a biopsy, which revealed cancer cells. A third firm, VitalCore Health Strategies, took over MDOC care in 2020.
\nAfter her release from prison, medical experts reviewed her records for her attorneys and reported that her earlier mammograms also showed signs of cancer, according to Andrew Tominello, one of her lawyers. Balfour said her cancer has spread to her lymph nodes, thoracic spine, bones and her liver.
\nThe failure to diagnose and treat her cancer was part of a pattern of the MDOC and providers not believing incarcerated people, Balfour said: “They always think everybody is faking. How can you tell me something that is going on inside of my body is not happening?”
\nThe repeated refusal to give her timely mammograms was indefensible, Tominello said: “They delayed over and over again, and they should not be able to get away with that.” He said if Balfour’s sister-in-law had not continually advocated on her behalf, “they would have probably tried to sweep it under the rug and hope that she passed away”.
\nThe suit also alleges that Balfour and others were required to clean the prison with chemicals linked to cancer, including glyphosate, the weed-killing chemical. The incarcerated people lacked protective equipment while exposed to chemicals and when mixing raw chemicals in toxic combinations, the complaint says.
\nPauline Rogers, co-founder of the Reaching and Educating for Community Hope (Rech) foundation, a Mississippi organization that helps women coming home from prison, said that deprivation behind bars erodes people’s health: “You have to fight for everything – for a toothbrush, for toilet paper, for a sanitary pad, for some decent water and your life is no different. You have to fight for a mammogram or something as simple as glasses.”
\nWexford and Centurion have both been accused of allowing preventable deaths of incarcerated people through inadequate care. Tominello said they function like traditional insurance companies “except they can deny your claim and you’ve got no recourse. And so just like the traditional insurance model, the less they have to pay out on claims, the more they make – it’s the same model, but they have less oversight.”
\nBalfour was incarcerated for 33 years on a murder conviction that was eventually overturned, then resentenced to manslaughter. She said she wanted to bring the case in hopes it would help her friends who remain incarcerated and struggle to access basic care.
\n“I try to live every day like it’s my last,” she said. “And as long as I’m living, I’m going to fight.”
\nKatelyn Head, an MDOC spokesperson, said the department does not comment on pending litigation. Wexford, Centurion and VitalCore did not immediately respond to inquiries on Wednesday.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f6f7a158823391b09f9b18ebf974c745f1ae388a/0_49_720_432/master/720.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=189dc0410f1e4ffb3c3d540ae2ecf1e2","height":432,"width":720,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Balfour’s lawsuit and medical records paint a picture of a prison healthcare system that deliberately delayed life-saving healthcare for years. 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","byline":"Sam Levin","body":"Donald Trump’s motions for a mistrial in the defamation case brought against him by the writer E Jean Carroll have been rejected by a federal judge, who added that the former president’s issues with the verdict had no “merit”.
\n\nIn an order filed on Wednesday, Judge Lewis Kaplan said the motion for a mistrial “made no sense” and that approving it “would have been entirely pointless”. Trump’s lawyers had previously called for a mistrial in the middle of their cross-examination of Carroll, which the judge denied at the time, instructing the jury to disregard the counsel’s remarks. He reiterated his decision and sharply criticized the efforts of Trump’s attorney in the written order this week.
\nLast month, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll an additional $83.3m after Kaplan found that he had defamed her in 2019. A jury previously had found that Trump had sexually abused her, awarding her $5m. Shortly after the judge’s decision, Trump decried it on Truth Social as “absolutely ridiculous” and said he would be filing an appeal.
\nTrump lawyer Alina Habba requested the mistrial after Carroll discussed deleting some death threats she had received to help with her anxiety and “get control of the situation”. Habba accused Carroll of “deleting evidence” and made the unusual mistrial request in front of the jury.
\nKaplan wrote that he had denied the motion “immediately” during that hearing “partly because it was untimely”, since the defendant had been aware of the alleged deletion of messages for nearly a year before the trial. The judge also noted that a mistrial is granted because of a procedural error or serious misconduct, meaning a mistrial would not have remedied any issue with improper disposal of electronic communications “if any there was”.
\nIf a mistrial were declared, a new trial would be called and the same issues would be in effect, meaning it would have “served no useful purpose”, Kaplan wrote, saying Habba’s subsequent written motion for a mistrial was “at least doubly frivolous” and “entirely baseless”. “Granting it now would be even less sensible … [and] a bootless exercise,” Kaplan went on.
\nThe judge also said that making the request in front of the jury had been “needlessly prejudicial to Ms Carroll”. The judge further said he would not grant any relief to Trump because the cross-examination had been sufficient and “he would not be justified in receiving anything more than what already occurred during trial”.
\nHabba did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
\nAfter the damages ruling, Trump wrote: “I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party. Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon. They have taken away all First Amendment Rights. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!”
\nCarroll previously said that the multimillion-dollar award showed “we don’t need to be afraid” of the former president, adding: “It was an astonishing discovery for me – he’s nothing.” The former Elle magazine columnist compared him to “a walrus snorting” and “a rhino flopping his hands” in an interview, adding: “He can be knocked down.”
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3d03793d2ed8fe1f120fd55cf86790b0d7a6bebb/0_183_5528_3319/master/5528.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=efaf346b969ce20fdc888caf6d4a6ecd","height":3319,"width":5528,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Donald Trump at a primary election night party in Nashua, New Hampshire, on 23 January 2024. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"A plaque recognizing the racist history of a southern California beach town that seized land from a Black family in the 1920s has been stolen, police say.
\nThe monument was erected last year in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles county to honor the history of Bruce’s Beach, where a Black couple built a popular resort for Black Americans in the early 1900s before the local government took control of their land and destroyed their business.
\n\nThe plaque at Bruce’s Beach park by the ocean was reported stolen on Monday, according to Manhattan Beach police, which has solicited tips about the theft.
\nThe site received national attention in recent years as LA county moved to return the valuable land to descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce. The Bruces bought the land in 1912 along the waterfront and built a resort that provided rare California beach access to Black residents. The family faced violence and harassment from the Ku Klux Klan and white locals, but the establishment continued to thrive until 1924, when Manhattan Beach officials condemned the land and adjacent homes owned by Black residents.
\nThe city used eminent domain to take the family’s property, claiming the site was needed to build a park. Instead, the property sat vacant for decades. The Bruces had sought $120,000 in litigation, but were awarded only $14,000; they were priced out of the area and moved to the east side of LA, where they worked as cooks in other establishments.
\n\nDescendants of the family fought for years for restitution and return of the land, which became home to an LA county lifeguard-training headquarters and parking lot. In 2022, the county agreed to give the land back to the family, which initially leased the property to the county for its continued use. The move was considered a significant victory in the ongoing fight for reparations in California and across the country. The family sold the land back to the county last year for around $20m.
\nBruce’s Beach was one of many Black sites of leisure that were shut down by racist government projects in the early 1900s. Santa Monica, next to Manhattan Beach, was home to a thriving Black community until the construction of a freeway displaced hundreds of families.
\n\nManhattan Beach is less than 1% Black today, and in 2021 the city council voted against issuing a symbolic proclamation to apologize to the Bruces, saying the apology would create liability for the city in future lawsuits. The stolen plaque at Bruce’s Beach park, located just up the hill from the beachfront land, acknowledged the history of “harassment, intimidation, and discrimination by some, including City Hall” against Black property owners in the area:
\n“The City’s actions at the time was racially motivated and wrong. Today, the City acknowledges and condemns those past actions, and empathizes with those whose property was seized. We are not the Manhattan Beach of one hundred years ago. We reject racism, hate, intolerance, and exclusion.”
\n\nManhattan Beach’s mayor apologized to the Bruces and Black residents when unveiling the monument last year, but some argued the text whitewashed the history and that the city has failed to address the ongoing exclusion of Black residents from the area, the LA Times reported.
\nThe plaque is one of numerous historical Black monuments recently reported stolen or vandalized in the US. Earlier this month, more than 100 plaques were stolen from one of LA’s first Black cemeteries. A statue honoring Jackie Robinson was stolen last week from a Little League baseball field in Kansas.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a9694e7dec2f70d774e4d236b32b3d62f333391b/0_0_4000_2667/master/4000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=dc3c06d6071df1cfa90c48aae77b1361","height":2667,"width":4000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"The monument at Bruce’s Beach park in Manhattan Beach, California, last year. 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Clendenin/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images","altText":"The monument at Bruce’s Beach Park","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images"},"renderedItem":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/rendered-items/us-news/2024/jan/31/bruces-beach-california-plaque-stolen","renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/31/bruces-beach-california-plaque-stolen?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/31/bruces-beach-california-plaque-stolen?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Article","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Alec Baldwin indicted for involuntary manslaughter in fatal gunfire on film set","rawTitle":"Alec Baldwin indicted for involuntary manslaughter in fatal gunfire on film set","item":{"id":"film/2024/jan/19/alec-baldwin-indicted-shooting-rust-movie","title":"Alec Baldwin indicted for involuntary manslaughter in fatal gunfire on film set","trailText":"Grand jury in New Mexico charged the actor for a shooting on Rust set that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins","standFirst":"Grand jury in New Mexico charged the actor for a shooting on Rust set that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins
","byline":"Sam Levin","body":"Actor Alec Baldwin is facing a new involuntary manslaughter charge over the 2021 fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the movie Rust.
\nA Santa Fe, New Mexico, grand jury indicted Baldwin on Friday, months after prosecutors had dismissed the same criminal charge against him.
\nDuring an October 2021 rehearsal on the set of Rust, a western drama, Baldwin was pointing a gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins when it went off, fatally striking her and wounding Joel Souza, the film’s director.
\nBaldwin, a co-producer and star of the film, has said he did not pull the trigger, but pulled back the hammer of the gun before it fired.
\nLast April, special prosecutors dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin, saying the firearm might have been modified prior to the shooting and malfunctioned and that forensic analysis was warranted. But in August, prosecutors said they were considering re-filing the charges after a new analysis of the weapon was completed.
\nA report from experts in ballistics and forensic testing, commissioned by the prosecutors, said: “Although Alec Baldwin repeatedly denies pulling the trigger, given the tests, findings and observations reported here, the trigger had to be pulled or depressed sufficiently to release the fully cocked or retracted hammer of the evidence revolver.”
\nProsecutors brought the new case before a grand jury in Santa Fe this week.
\n“We look forward to our day in court,” Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro, defense attorneys for Baldwin, said in an email on Friday.
\nBaldwin and his co-producers are also facing civil lawsuits seeking financial compensation, including from members of the Rust crew, but judges have put those cases on hold while the criminal matter proceeds.
\nHannah Gutierrez-Reed, the weapons supervisor for Rust, was previously charged with involuntary manslaughter and evidence tampering and her trial is scheduled for February.
\nGutierrez-Reed pleaded not guilty last year. Prosecutors have alleged that she acted in a reckless manner when she handed the loaded gun to Baldwin on set and have accused her of failing to ensure that all the rounds in the firearm were dummies. Gutierrez-Reed has also been accused of drinking in the evening before the fatal incident, with prosecutors suggesting she was hungover during the shooting.
\nThe tampering charge stems from allegations that Gutierrez-Reed had given a small bag of cocaine to someone else after she was questioned by police.
\nGutierrez-Reed’s lawyers, who previously sought to have the involuntary manslaughter charges against her dismissed, accused prosecutors of mishandling the case and attempting a “character assassination” of their client.
\nA former special prosecutor on the case stepped down last year after Baldwin’s attorneys sought her removal due to her role as a state representative in the legislature.
\nDavid Halls, the film’s assistant director and safety coordinator, pleaded no contest to unsafe handling of a firearm last March. He has cooperated in the investigation and was given a sentence of six months probation. He and Baldwin have said they were unaware there were live rounds in the gun. When the charges against Baldwin were dropped last year, Halls’s lawyer said: “Mr Halls never believed Mr Baldwin should be charged with a crime. It was a tragic accident that is best resolved out of criminal court.”
\nThe Rust Movie Productions company has also paid a $100,000 fine to New Mexico workplace safety regulators. The firm was accused of violating industry protocols and failing to remedy issues that arose after there were two misfires on the set prior to Hutchins’s killing.
\nRust resumed production in April of last year. Matthew Hutchins, the husband of the late cinematographer, had negotiated an agreement for him to become an executive producer on the film.
\nThe tragedy has rippled across Hollywood and led to improvements in gun safety, industry experts have said.
\nThe Associated Press contributed reporting
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3a012f101b31f80ecf45e3dd96a4e7957afbcd92/180_0_5207_3128/master/5207.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=6431ba319dcd9988bfe7313c45d06b48","height":3128,"width":5207,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Alec Baldwin on the set of Rust in New Mexico. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"A former Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot an unarmed 24-year-old man in his car in 2019 was sentenced to 30 days in jail on Friday.
\nAndrew Lyons, one of two deputies who fired a barrage of bullets at Ryan Twyman in a parking lot in south Los Angeles, pleaded no contest to assault with a firearm and assault under color of authority, said the district attorney, George Gascón.
\nHe had originally been charged with voluntary manslaughter. He will be on probation for two years and his officer certification has been revoked under the deal, meaning he can no longer serve in law enforcement in California, Gascón said. Two years was the maximum probation term allowed under the law, and if he commits a violation of probation, he could face more than a decade in prison, the DA said.
\nLyons surrendered on Friday and was taken to jail. The criminal conviction and jail time for the 39-year-old is an exceptionally rare outcome for an on-duty killing by a law enforcement official.
\nOn 6 June 2019, two Los Angeles sheriff’s department (LASD) deputies drove up to an apartment complex in Willowbrook in south LA, not far from Twyman’s home in Compton. Surveillance video showed the deputies exited their car with guns pointed at a parked vehicle. As the two officers approached, the car reversed and both deputies opened fire at it, continuing to shoot from a distance as the vehicle appeared to roll away.
\nThe car came to a stop, still in the lot, but footage showed Lyons return to his car, open his trunk, pick up an assault rifle and continue to shoot at the motionless vehicle. The footage did not have sound and the entire interaction was less than a minute. The sheriff’s department said the two deputies fired a total of 34 rounds. Twyman was in the driver’s seat.
\nLyons was fired from the LASD after the shooting. The second deputy did not face charges.
\n\nTwyman was one of four people killed by officers in Los Angeles county that day, and the case sparked protests in the city. Twyman’s family has been organizing against police brutality in the years since, pushing for the ouster of the former district attorney Jackie Lacey over her failure to prosecute officers, demonstrating against the scandal-plagued former sheriff Alex Villanueva and protesting against the powerful police unions. His relatives are part of a group of families of people killed by police who reported that the LASD harassed them after they spoke out.
\nTwyman was a father of three. His sons were aged one, two and three when he was killed.
\nTommy Twyman, Ryan’s mother, stood with her family at a press conference alongside Gascón after the sentencing, saying: “Today is bittersweet. We all miss him very, very much. We miss his smile, his laugh. We miss him chasing dogs around the backyard. His three boys really, really miss him. I promised him we’d fight to the end and we did.”
\nAn official with the DA’s office told reporters the manslaughter charge required proof that the defendant caused the death, and because two officers fired shots, that could have created a challenge.
\nLyons was only the second officer to face criminal charges for an on-duty fatal shooting in Los Angeles county in over 20 years. The other prosecuted officer was acquitted at trial. Officers in Los Angeles, the most populous county in the US, have killed more than 1,000 people since 2000, according to a Los Angeles Times database.
\nGascón, who was elected on a platform of holding police accountable, has also filed criminal charges against officers for on-duty assaults and perjury during his tenure.
\nLyons did not speak at the hearing, the LA Times reported. “From the outset, we have stated this is a case based in politics, not facts,” his lawyers said in a statement, criticizing the DA. “Mr Lyons has reluctantly agreed to accept a plea in this matter and to end his 15-year law enforcement career out of his belief that it is in the best interest of his family … Being a first responder is an inherently dangerous job. In Los Angeles county that danger is compounded by District Attorney George Gascon’s injection of politics into his analysis of public safety decision-making.”
\nBefore details of the sentence were announced, Chiquita Twyman, Ryan’s sister, said the process of the criminal proceedings had been grueling for the family, but she was glad there was some resolution: “It has been a such a long time – four and a half years – so at least my family can now mourn correctly and have some closure from the trauma … But my nephews, three young Black men, will never have a father. It’s horrible.”
\nOf the plea agreement, she added, “There is some justice, but there is no accountability. He has never apologized to my family.”
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f2a09b6cad0a0b89466c60fbe63f44ae6dea57a3/0_10_1024_614/master/1024.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=3b9315dfea64d6ce681b7a534a251dd5","height":614,"width":1024,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Ryan Twyman. 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","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"A California city has agreed to pay $5m to the family of a 20-year-old who was sleeping in his car when police approached and shot him 55 times in 2019.
\n\nThe city of Vallejo, north-east of San Francisco, said in a statement on Wednesday that the city council approved the payout to the relatives of Willie McCoy, an aspiring Bay Area rapper fatally shot by six officers in a case that sparked national outrage. McCoy was in his car at a Taco Bell on 9 February 2019 when the police arrived and quickly fired a barrage of bullets into his vehicle.
\nPolice claimed McCoy had “moved his hands downward” toward a gun, but body-camera footage did not capture that and instead appeared to show that he had been startled awake and moved his hand to scratch his shoulder. The footage also showed that officers had not tried to wake him or announce they were police before pointing firearms at his head. Before McCoy awoke, officers said: “If he reaches for it, you know what to do,” and “I’m going to pull him out and snatch his ass.”
\nThe killing sparked protests in California and significant backlash after a consultant hired by the city concluded that “the 55 rounds fired by six officers in ~3.5 seconds is reasonable based upon my training and experience as a range instructor”.
\nProsecutors declined to file charges against the officers.
\nThe case escalated scrutiny of the Vallejo police department, which has an extensive history of brutality and misconduct scandals. From 2010 to 2020, the city had one of the highest rates of police killings in California, and more than a dozen officers have shot multiple civilians on the job without facing consequences. A 2020 investigation by local news site Open Vallejo revealed that some officers commemorated their shootings by bending the points of their badges each time they killed someone.
\nOne of the officers who shot McCoy had previously killed Ronell Foster, 32, an unarmed man who had been riding his bike without a light. The city paid Foster’s family a $5.7m settlement, the largest in Vallejo’s history.
\nThe McCoy family’s civil case had not yet gone to trial and could have dragged on for many more years. The family, however, was divided about settling, said Kori McCoy, one of McCoy’s brothers, and David Harrison, a cousin. They are co-founders of the Willie McCoy Foundation.
\n\n“Almost five years ago, Willie McCoy Jr was executed by Vallejo police as the world watched in confusion and our family watched in horror as we tried to comprehend what could possibly warrant so many gun shots into a man sleeping in his vehicle?” the two relatives said in a statement on Thursday. “Our justice system has failed to charge, arrest or release the truth … We know that the system doesn’t work the way we were taught in civics class when we were growing up. It is just a cloaking device to camouflage the racism that is embedded in the very fabric of our legal system designed to protect law enforcement at all costs.”
\nThey said they were hoping to go to trial to bring about systemic change and expose broader problems in the department: “There is no settlement celebration. There is no justice here and we pray that any future families learn from our experience. Hopefully they will be successful in bringing down this wicked system feeding on our people.”
\nMarc McCoy, another brother, said by phone: “No amount of money is worth Willie’s life. On one hand, you’re relieved you’re getting something for Willie … but this country is so used to these situations that we treat victims as just pieces of money. It’s always: ‘Someone is killed, here’s some money.’ But we are not affecting the lives of police officers who are doing the killing. The taxpayers of Vallejo are paying this debt, not the police. I wish there was a way to hold the police themselves accountable.”
\nThe city’s statement said the settlement “does not imply an admission of liability or wrongdoing by the City of Vallejo or any City employee”.
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3baadbe741fdf4216832b2e065562bfe9acc60b4/427_35_1492_895/master/1492.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=9802d5e876b5deac5017f444397de1c1","height":895,"width":1492,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Screengrab from a music video of Willie McCoy. 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Who is most affected?","rawTitle":"2023 saw record killings by US police. Who is most affected?","item":{"id":"us-news/2024/jan/08/2023-us-police-violence-increase-record-deadliest-year-decade","title":"2023 saw record killings by US police. Who is most affected?","trailText":"Officers killed at least 1,232 people last year – the deadliest year for homicides by law enforcement in over a decade, data shows","standFirst":"Officers killed at least 1,232 people last year – the deadliest year for homicides by law enforcement in over a decade, data shows
","byline":"Sam Levin in Los Angeles","body":"Police in the US killed at least 1,232 people last year, making 2023 the deadliest year for homicides committed by law enforcement in more than a decade, according to newly released data.
\nMapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group, catalogs deaths at the hands of police and last year recorded the highest number of killings since its national tracking began in 2013. The data suggests a systemic crisis and a remarkably consistent pattern, with an average of roughly three people killed by officers each day, with slight upticks in recent years.
\n\nThe group recorded 30 more deaths in 2023 than the previous year, with 1,202 people killed in 2022; 1,148 in 2021; 1,160 in 2020; and 1,098 in 2019. The numbers include shooting victims, as well as people fatally shocked by a stun gun, beaten or restrained. The 2023 count is preliminary, and cases could be added as the database is updated.
\nHigh-profile 2023 cases included the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis; the tasing of Keenan Anderson in Los Angeles; and the shooting in Lancaster, California, of Niani Finlayson, who had called 911 for help over domestic violence. There were hundreds more who garnered little attention, including Ricky Cobb, shot by a Minnesota trooper after he was pulled over for a tail light violation; Tahmon Kenneth Wilson, unarmed and shot outside a Bay Area cannabis dispensary; and Isidra Clara Castillo, killed when police in Amarillo, Texas, fired at someone else in the same car as her.
\nHere are some key takeaways from the data and experts’ insight into why US police continue to kill civilians at a rate an order of magnitude higher than comparable nations.
\nThe record number of police killings happened in a year that saw a significant decrease in homicides, according to preliminary reports of 2023 murder rates; one analyst said the roughly 13% decrease in homicides last year appears to be the largest year-to-year drop on record, and reports have also signaled drops in other violent and property crimes.
\n“Violence is trending downwards at an unprecedented rate, but the exception to that seems to be the police, who are engaging in more violence each year,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a policy analyst and data scientist who founded Mapping Police Violence. “It hits home that many of the promises and actions made after the murder of George Floyd don’t appear to have reduced police violence on a nationwide level.”
\nSome advocates say the lack of systemic reforms and continued expansion of police forces have helped sustain the high rates. Polls show most Americans believe crime is rising, and amid voter concerns about safety and violence, municipalities have continued to increase police budgets.
\nMonifa Bandele, an activist on the leadership team for the Movement for Black Lives, said that while state and local governments continue to rely on police to address mental health crises, domestic disputes and other social problems, killings will continue: “The more police you put on the streets to interact with members of my community, the greater the risk of harm, abuse and death.”
\nThe circumstances behind the 2023 killings mirrored past trends. Last year, 445 people killed by police had been fleeing, representing 36% of all cases. There have been efforts across the country to prevent police from shooting at fleeing cars and people, recognizing the danger to the public. But the rates have been steady in recent years, with one in three killings involving people fleeing.
\n\nThe underlying reasons for the encounters were also consistent. In 2023, 139 killings (11%) involved claims a person was seen with a weapon; 107 (9%) began as traffic violations; 100 (8%) were mental health or welfare checks; 79 (6%) were domestic disturbances; 73 (6%) were cases where no offenses were alleged; 265 (22%) involved other alleged nonviolent offenses; and 469 (38%) involved claims of violent offenses or more serious crimes.
\n“The majority of cases have not originated from reported violent crimes. The police are routinely called into situations where there was no violence until police arrived and the situation escalated,” Sinyangwe said.
\nIn 2023, there were more killings by police in rural zip codes (319 cases, or 26% of killings) than in urban ones (292 cases, or 24%); the remainder of killings were in suburban areas, with a handful of cases undetermined. This marks a shift from previous years when the number of killings in cities outpaced rural deaths.
\nCounty sheriff’s departments, which tend to have jurisdiction over more rural and suburban areas and face less oversight, were responsible for 32% of killings last year; 10 years prior, sheriffs were involved in only 26% of killings.
\nIn 2023, Black people were killed at a rate 2.6 times higher than white people, Mapping Police Violence found. Last year, 290 people killed by police were Black, making up 23.5% of victims, while Black Americans make up roughly 14% of the total population. Native Americans were killed at a rate 2.2 times greater than white people, and Latinos were killed at a rate 1.3 times greater.
\nBlack and brown people have also consistently been more likely to be killed while fleeing. From 2013 to 2023, 39% of Black people who were killed by police had been fleeing, typically either running or driving away. That figure is 35% for Latinos, 33% for Native Americans, 29% for white people and 22% for Asian Americans.
\nPolice in New Mexico killed 23 people last year, making it the state with the highest number of fatalities per capita, with a rate of 10.9 killings per 1 million residents, Mapping Police Violence found.
\nIn one New Mexico case in April, Farmington officers showed up to the wrong house and killed the resident, Robert Dotson, when he opened the door with a handgun. In November, an officer in Las Cruces near the border fatally shot Teresa Gomez after he questioned why she was parked outside a public housing complex.
\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico’s most populous city, also ranked highest in killings per capita among the country’s 50 largest cities. Albuquerque police killed six people in 2023, while many cities with substantially larger populations, including San Jose and Honolulu, each killed only one civilian last year. Some advocates have said gun culture in the state, particularly in rural areas, could be a factor in the high rates of police violence.
\n\nA spokesperson for the New Mexico governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, said in an email that she was “committed to promoting professional and constitutional policing”, and noted the governor signed a bill into law last year “aimed at increased accountability for those in this critical profession”. SB19 established a duty to intervene when officers witness certain unlawful uses of force; prohibited neck restraints and firing at fleeing vehicles; and required the establishment of a public police misconduct database.
\nSpokespeople for Albuquerque police did not respond to an inquiry on Friday.
\nFrom 2013 to 2022, 98% of police killings have not resulted in officers facing charges, Mapping Police Violence reported.
\nThis contributes to the steady rate of violence, said Joanna Schwartz, University of California, Los Angeles law professor and expert on how officers evade accountability for misconduct: “Even with public attention to police killings in recent years and unprecedented community engagement, it’s really business as usual. That means tremendous discretion given to police to use force whenever they believe it’s appropriate, very limited federal and state oversight of policing, and union agreements across the country that make it very difficult to effectively investigate, discipline or fire officers.”
\nProblem officers with repeated brutality incidents or killings frequently remain on the force or get jobs in other departments, she noted.
\nSome cities with histories of police brutality had notably few killings in 2023. St Louis police killed one person last year, and there were no killings recorded by Minneapolis, Seattle or Boston police.
\n“It suggests that even places with longstanding issues can see improvement. It’s not fixed that they always have to be this way,” Sinyangwe said.
\nBandele noted that community violence prevention programs have helped reduce reliance on police and limit vulnerable people’s exposure to potentially lethal encounters. Denver has received national attention for its program sending civilian responders to mental health calls instead of police. A Brooklyn neighborhood last year experimented with civilian responders to 911 calls.
\n“Every week, someone who needs mental health care ends up killed by police,” Bandele said. “But there are alternative ways to respond.”
","section":"US news","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5ca240ac6eff660c80048980c0b9ccfc62709457/0_0_4000_2667/master/4000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=d1f54f4c24913a5421945b8421fdbb00","height":2667,"width":4000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"People protest the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, on 28 January 2023. 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","byline":"Sam Levin","body":"A former Colorado police officer convicted in the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain was sentenced to 14 months in county jail on Friday.
\nRandy Roedema, an ex-Aurora police department (APD) officer, was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and third-degree assault in October. He is the first official to face jail time for the killing of McClain, a 23-year-old whose death led to years of protests and calls for reforms.
\nThe negligent homicide charge, a felony defined as killing someone by failing to recognize a substantial risk to their life, carries a punishment of up to three years in prison. The assault count is a misdemeanor punishable by up to two years in jail.
\nNeither conviction mandated prison time. Judge Mark Warner gave Roedema a sentence of probation and no state prison time for the homicide conviction and the 14-month jail sentence for the assault, with authorized work release.
\n\nTwo other officers who faced criminal charges were acquitted last year. One of them, Nathan Woodyard, got his job back on the Aurora police force and was awarded $200,000 in back pay. In December, two paramedics were convicted of criminally negligent homicide for their roles in McClain’s death, a rare case of paramedics facing accountability for a death in police custody. The paramedics’ sentencing is scheduled for 1 March.
\nSheneen McClain, Elijah’s mother, who has sat through three separate trials over several months, gave emotional testimony in court on Friday calling for the harshest punishment.
\n“Elijah was a young adult who had his whole life ahead of him … Elijah McClain loved music, he loved dancing, he loved singing, he loved animals and he was grateful for his life,” she said. “Elijah McClain was a healthy young man the night Randy Roedema chose to show my son the power and privileges of the boys in blue … Peace officers are not supposed to be murderers, but that is what Randy Roedema became the night he bullied my son to death.”
\nMcClain, a massage therapist, was stopped by police on the night of 24 August 2019 on his walk home from a convenience store. He was listening to music on headphones when a passing driver called 911 to say he “looks sketchy” while acknowledging he did not appear to have weapons or pose danger.
\nBody-camera footage showed Woodyard first stopping McClain, quickly grabbing him and shouting: “I have a right to stop you because you’re being suspicious.” Roedema and the third officer, Jason Rosenblatt, arrived and surrounded him. The officers ended up tackling McClain to the ground, holding their bodyweight against him as he passed out. When the two paramedics arrived, they injected him with a dangerously high dose of ketamine, a sedative, and he suffered cardiac arrest.
\nFueling outrage about the case were McClain’s desperate cries for help caught on camera, including, “Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies. I don’t eat meat,” “I’m an introvert” and “I can’t breathe.”
\nAt trial, Rosenblatt’s attorney had sought to cast blame on Roedema, saying Roedema had jerked McClain’s arm and held his knee on his back.
\nIn announcing his sentencing, Warner noted that criminally negligent homicide is not considered a “violent crime” in Colorado law, but said Roedema had “used relatively significant force against Mr McClain when he was handcuffed and really wasn’t much of a threat to anybody”. He also cited Roedema’s “lack of any criminal history, a positive social history and his service to his country and community”.
\nRoedema was given four years of probation for the homicide offense and will also have to do community service. The judge also noted that had he given the officer a three-year prison sentence, it’s possible he would have been released on good behavior within 13 months.
\nIn her remarks before the judge’s decision, Sheneen McClain talked about the pain of listening to defendants at trial repeatedly claim they were not responsible for her son’s death: “I only heard lies and blaming others for their trained cruelty. I heard no humanity or accountability … Elijah McClain was held down by Randy Roedema and tortured in numerous ways for no other reason except Elijah was different.”
\nRoedema’s lawyer had argued he was not a danger to society and would be at risk of violence in prison, citing the recent prison stabbing of Derek Chauvin, convicted of murdering George Floyd.
\nJoanna Schwartz, a UCLA law professor and expert on police accountability, noted that only about 2% of killings by police lead to charges and even fewer cases result in convictions. The acquittals were a reminder of how challenging it is to secure consequences for officers in criminal court: “This is an extremely rare occurrence. And even under circumstances as high-profile as this, it was a mixed judgment against the officers.”
\n• This article was amended on 6 January 2024. The two convicted health workers were paramedics, not EMTs.
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