Global Cryonics Technology Market Expected to Reach Highest CAGR by 2025| COVID-19 Impact Analysis and Top Players: Praxair, Cellulis, Cryologics,…

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This study covers following key players:PraxairCellulisCryologicsCryothermKrioRusVWRThermo Fisher ScientificCustom Biogenic SystemsOregon CryonicsAlcor Life Extension FoundationOsiris CryonicsSigma-AldrichSouthern Cryonics

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Market segment by Type, the product can be split into Slow freezingVitrificationUltra-rapid

Market segment by Application, split into Animal husbandryFishery scienceMedical sciencePreservation of microbiology cultureConserving plant biodiversity

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Cryonics, brain preservation and the weird science of cheating death – CNET

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Linda Chamberlain works just down the hallway from her husband. She walks past him every day. Occasionally she'll stop by to check in on him and say hello.

The only problem is, Fred Chamberlain has been dead for eight years. Shortly after he was pronounced legally dead from prostate cancer, Fred was cryopreserved -- his body was filled with a medical-grade antifreeze, cooled to minus 196 degrees Celsius and carefully lowered into a giant vat of liquid nitrogen.

So when Linda visits Fred, she talks to him through the insulated, stainless-steel wall of a 10-foot-tall preservation chamber. And he's not alone in there. Eight people reside in that massive cylinder along with him, and more than 170 are preserved in similar chambers in the same room. All of them elected to have their bodies stored in subzero temperatures, to await a future when they could be brought back to life. Cryonically preserved in the middle of the Arizona desert.

This story is part of Hacking the Apocalypse, CNET's documentary series on the tech saving us from the end of the world.

Linda Chamberlain is cheerful as she shows me her husband's perhaps-not-final resting place. She places her hand on the cool steel and gives it a loving pat. Being in a room with 170 dead people isn't morbid to her.

"It makes me feel happy," she says. "Because I know that they have the potential to be restored to life and health. And I have the potential of being with them again."

Alcor proclaims itself a world leader in cryonics, offering customers the chance to preserve their bodies indefinitely, until they can be restored to full health and function through medical discoveries that have yet to be made. For the low price of $220,000, Alcor is selling the chance to live a second life.

It's a slim chance.

Critics say cryonics is a pipe dream, no different from age-old chimeras like the fountain of youth. Scientists say there's no way to adequately preserve a human body or brain, and that the promise of bringing a dead brain back to life is thousands of years away.

But Alcor is still selling that chance. And ever since Linda and Fred Chamberlain founded the Alcor Life Extension Foundation back in 1972, Linda has watched Alcor's membership swell with more people wanting to take that chance. More than 1,300 people have now signed up to have their bodies sent to Alcor instead of the graveyard.

And when her time is up, Linda Chamberlain plans to join them.

Hacking the Apocalypseis CNET's new documentary series digging into the science and technology that could save us from the end of the world. You can check out our episodes onPandemic,Nuclear Winter,Global Drought,Tsunamis,CryonicsandEscaping the Planetand see the full series onYouTube.

Photographs of "patients" line the walls of Alcor's offices.

From the outside, Alcor's facilities don't look like the kind of place you'd come to live forever.

When I arrived at the company's headquarters, a nondescript office block in Scottsdale, Arizona, a short drive out of Phoenix, I expected something grander. After all, this is a place that's attempting to answer the question at the heart of human existence: Can we cheat death?

I've come here to find out why someone would choose cryonics. What drives someone to reject the natural order of life and death, and embrace an end that's seen by many, scientists and lay people alike, as the stuff of science fiction?

But after a short time at Alcor, I realize the true believers here don't see cryonics as a way to cheat death. They don't even see death as the end.

"Legal death only really means that your heart and your lungs have stopped functioning without intervention," Linda Chamberlain tells me. "It doesn't mean your cells are dead, it doesn't mean even your organs are dead."

Alcor refers to the people preserved in its facilities as "patients" for that very reason -- it doesn't consider them to be dead.

In Chamberlain's view, the idea of death as an "on-off switch" is outdated. People that died 100 years ago could well have been saved by modern medical interventions that we take for granted in the 21st century. So what about 100 years from now? Alcor hopes that by pressing pause on life, its patients might be revived when medical technology has improved.

"Our best estimates are that within 50 to 100 years, we will have the medical technologies needed to restore our patients to health and function," says Chamberlain.

We're killing people who could potentially be preserved. We're just throwing them in the ground so they can be eaten by worms and bacteria.

Alcor CEO Max More

Alcor CEO Max More agrees. In his view, cryonics is about giving people who die today a second chance. And he says our current views about death and burial are robbing people of a potential future.

"We're killing people who could potentially be preserved," More says. "We're just throwing them in the ground so they can be eaten by worms and bacteria, or we're burning them up. And to me, that's kind of crazy when we could give them a chance if they want it.

"If you think about life insurance, it's actually death insurance -- it pays out on death. This really is life insurance. It's a backup plan."

An early copy of Cryonics magazine sits in Alcor's offices, showing the inside of one of its preservation chambers.

Alcor hasn't exactly mapped out how its patients will be brought back to full function and health, or what revival technologies the future will bring. Its website speaks about the possibility of molecular nanotechnology -- that is, using microscopic nano-robots to "replace old damaged chromosomes with new ones in every cell."

But that level of cellular regeneration isn't something Alcor is working on. The company is in the business of selling preservation, but it's not developing the technologies for restoration. In fact, no one currently working at Alcor is likely to be responsible for reviving patients. That responsibility will be handed on to the next generation (and potentially many more generations after that) -- scientists of some undetermined time in the future, who will have developed the technology necessary to reverse the work that Alcor is doing now. It seems like a convenient gap for cryonics: Sell the promise in the present without the burden of proving the end result.

Our goal is to have reversible suspended animation, just like in the movies. We want it to be that perfect.

Alcor founder Linda Chamberlain

Chamberlain herself admits the future is ultimately unclear and that they "don't know how powerful the revival technologies are going to be." But she does know the end result Alcor is aiming for.

"Our goal is to have reversible suspended animation, just like in the movies," she says. "We want it to be that perfect. We're not there yet, but we're always working on improving our techniques."

The science behind cryonics is unproven. The procedures are highly experimental. No human -- specifically, no human brain -- has been brought back from death or from a state of postmortem preservation. Alcor points to research in worms and the organs of small mammals that it says indicates the potential for cryonics. There are famous names associated with the movement (Alcor admits famed baseballer Ted Williams is a patient), but there aren't exactly any human success stories who've awoken from cryonic preservation to hit the motivational speaking circuit.

James Bedford, the first man to enter cryonic suspension, according to Alcor. Bedford was preserved in a "cryocapsule" in 1967 (five years before Alcor was founded), before being transferred into Alcor's facilities in 1991.

Even More isn't making any promises. He acknowledges that the company may not even exist when it comes time for its patients to wake up.

"There are no guarantees," he says. "We're not promising to bring you back on May 27th, 2082, or whatever. We don't know officially this will work. We don't know for sure that the organization [Alcor] will survive... We don't know if an asteroid will land on us. There's no guarantees. But it's a shot. It's an opportunity. And it just seems to be better than the alternative."

The way the Alcor team sees it, you have a better chance of waking up from here than you do if you're sent to the crematorium.

One of the central questions of cryonics is how you preserve a dead body if you hope to revive it.

Even if they don't know exactly when or how patients will be brought back, the team at Alcor knows one thing is vital: They need to preserve as much of the brain and body as perfectly as possible.

While they may be clinically dead when they arrive in the operating room, Alcor's "patients" are intubated and kept on ice while a mechanical thumper (shown here on a dummy) keeps blood flowing around the body, all in a bid to preserve the body as thoroughly as possible.

That life-saving mortuary practice takes place inside Alcor's operating room -- a sort of hospital-meets-morgue where the organization prepares bodies for "long-term care."

When patients come through the doors at Alcor, they've already been pronounced legally dead. Ideally, they haven't had to travel far to get here and they've had their body put on ice as soon as possible after clinical death. According to Chamberlain, that hypothermia is vital for "slowing down the dying process." I didn't think I'd hear someone say that about a dead person.

During the first stages of cryonic preservation, bodies are "perfused" with a medical-grade antifreeze, all in a bid to prevent ice crystals forming. From here, the body vitrifies, rather than freezing.

(I also didn't expect to see a dead person in the operating room. At least, that's what I thought when I saw a human dummy waiting in the ice bath by the door. One of Alcor's employees picked up the dummy's hand to wave at me and I genuinely think that moment shortened my life span by two years.)

The ice bath is the first step in the preservation process, and it's here where the patient is placed in a kind of post-death life support. Drugs are administered to slow down metabolic processes, the body is intubated to maintain oxygen levels, and a mechanical thumper pumps the heart to ensure blood keeps flowing around the body.

The team then prepares the body to be cooled down to its permanent storage temperature. The blood is replaced with cryoprotectant (think of it like medical-grade antifreeze), which is pumped through the veins, all in a bid to (surprisingly) prevent the body freezing.

Freezing might sound like the natural end goal of cryopreservation, but it's actually incredibly damaging. Our bodies are made up of about 50 to 60% water, and when this water starts to freeze, it forms ice crystals which damage the body's organs and veins.

But if that water is replaced with cryoprotectant, Alcor says it can slowly reduce temperatures so the body vitrifies -- turning into a kind of glass-like state, rather than freezing. From here, the body is placed in a giant stainless steel chamber, known as a dewar. And Alcor says a cryopreserved body can be stored in this "long-term care" for decades.

I missed something when I first walked into the operating room. At the back, behind the ice bath and medical instruments (including surgical scissors and, chillingly, unexplained saws), there's a clear box, about the size of a milk crate, with a circular metal ring clamped inside.

It's a box for human heads.

This is designed for patients who've elected to preserve their head only, removed from the body from the collarbone up. These preserved heads are referred to as "neuro patients."

This small perspex box in the Alcor operating room is used to clamp human heads in place for cryopreservation.

If putting my whole body on ice was a bridge too far, then cutting off and preserving my head is beyond anything I can fathom. But it's a choice some of Alcor's patients make. The neuro patients are stored in small, barrel-sized vats while they wait for long-term care. The moment I lifted the lid on one of these vats -- nitrogen gas billowing out, human head obscured just inches below -- will stay with me forever.

Each preservation chamber can hold four bodies (positioned with the head at the bottom, to keep the brain as cool as possible) and five "neuro patients" stacked down the center.

It's cheaper if you elect to preserve just your head. Alcor charges only $80,000 for the head, compared with $220,000 for the full body. But there are also pragmatic reasons for choosing this more selective form of cryonic preservation.

When Alcor cryopreserves a body, the main priority is to preserve the brain and cause as little damage as possible. After all, the brain is not only the center of cognitive function, but also long-term memory. Essentially everything that makes you who you are.

You might be attached to your body now (both figuratively and literally), but many people at Alcor believe that, by the time medical science has advanced enough to bring a person back to life, their full body won't be needed. Whether you're regenerating a human body from DNA found in the head or uploading a person's consciousness to a new physical body, if we reach a point where cryonic preservation can be reversed, potentially hundreds of years in the future, your 20th or 21st century body will be outdated hardware.

That's certainly a view Linda Chamberlain takes. When she goes, only her head will stay.

"There's a lot of DNA in all that tissue and material," she says of the human head. "A new body can be grown for you from your own DNA. It's just a new, beautiful body that hasn't aged and hasn't had damage from disease."

In fact, when Chamberlain thinks of her future body, she doesn't want to limit herself to the kind of human form she has now.

"I hope that I won't have a biological body, but I'll have a body made out of nanobots," she tells me. "I can be as beautiful as I want to be. I won't be old anymore."

I hope that I won't have a biological body, but I'll have a body made out of nanobots.

Alcor founder Linda Chamberlain

I tell her she's already beautiful. She laughs.

"But if you have a nanobot swarm, it can reconfigure itself any way you want!" she replies, completely serious. "If I want to go swimming in the ocean, I have to worry about sharks. But after I have my nanobots body, if I want to go swimming in the ocean, I can just reconfigure myself to be like an orca, a killer whale. And then the sharks have to look out for me."

Waking up 100 years from now as a fully reconfigurable, shark-hunting nanobot orca sounds like fun.

But this kind of future is possible only if the process of going into cryonic preservation doesn't damage your brain. The brain is a staggeringly complex organ, and storing it at subzero temperatures for decades at a time has the potential to cause serious cellular damage.

And according to some scientists, that's the main issue with cryonics. Before you even get to the issue of reanimation, they say, cryonics doesn't come close to delivering on the promise of preservation.

Surgical instruments in Alcor's operating room.

Neuroscientist Ken Hayworth is one expert who's highly skeptical. Hayworth isn't opposed to preservation -- he was a member of Alcor before he left to found the Brain Preservation Foundation with the goal of building dialogue between cryonicists and the broader scientific community. He wants brain preservation to be a respected field of scientific study. And in 2010, he laid down a challenge to help build that credibility.

"[We] put out a very concrete challenge that said, 'Hey, cryonics community, prove to us that you can at least preserve those structures of the brain that neuroscience knows are critical to long-term memory, meaning the synaptic connectivity of the brain," he says.

"The cryonics community, unfortunately, has not met the bare minimum requirements of that prize."

Hayworth says he's seen examples of animal brains preserved using techniques very similar to what cryonics companies say they use, but the samples showed a significant number of dead cells.

"I take that to mean that there was probably a lot of damage to those structures that encode memory," he says. "It was like, 'We're looking at something that doesn't look right at all.'"

We're looking at something that doesn't look right at all.

Ken Hayworth

However, Hayworth has seen a technique that successfully preserved a brain so well that it was awarded the Brain Preservation Prizeby his foundation. This prize recognized a team of researchers for preserving synapses across the whole brain of a pig. But the technique, known as "aldehyde stabilized cryopreservation," has two limitations that differ from the promise of cryonics. Firstly, it requires the brain to be filled with gluteraldehyde, a kind of embalming fluid, which means the brain can never be revived. And secondly? It's a lethal process that needs to be conducted while a mammal is living.

"It almost instantly glues together all the proteins in the brain," says Hayworth. "Now you're as dead as a rock at that point. You ain't coming back. But the advantage of that is it glues all of them in position, it doesn't destroy information."

Retaining that information is vital because, according to Hayworth, it could allow you to re-create a person's mind in the future. Forget transplanting your head onto a new body. Hayworth says the information from a preserved brain could potentially be scanned and uploaded into another space, such as a computer, allowing you to live on as a simulation.

You might not be a walking, talking human like you once were. But, in Hayworth's view, that's not the only way to live again.

"I think there's plenty of reason to suspect that future technologies will be able to bring somebody back -- future technologies like brain scanning, and mind uploading and brain simulation."

Being preserved long enough (and well enough) that you can live on as a simulation may be one of the end goals that cryonicists hope to achieve.

But there are plenty of critics who say we won't reach that point anytime soon. They say there's no way to know whether cryonics adequately preserves the brain, because we don't fully understand how the mind works, let alone how to physically preserve its complexity.

Ken Miller is a professor of neuroscience and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York. He's spent his life trying to understand the complexity of the human brain.

"Some people say [the brain] is the most complicated thing in the universe," says Miller.

"The most basic answer to how the brain works is, we don't know. We know how a lot of pieces work ... but we're very far from understanding the system."

It's at least thousands of years before we would know and really understand how the brain works.

Ken Miller

According to Miller, while we know a lot about parts of the brain -- how the neurons function, how electrical signals travel to the brain -- the complete picture is still a mystery.

"In my opinion, it's at least thousands of years before we would know and really understand how the brain works to the point where you could take all the pieces ... and put it back together and make a mind out of it," says Miller.

"It's just the complexity. Levels and levels and levels and levels -- it's beyond the imagination."

And what if we reach that point? What if, a thousand years from now, science was capable of restoring my cryonically preserved brain and uploading it to some kind of simulator -- would I still be me?

Sitting in his office, I put the question to Miller. And in the kind of meta way that I've realized is normal when speaking to a professor of theoretical neuroscience, I see the cogs of his mind working. His brain, thinking about another brain, living on as a simulated brain. My brain is melting.

"I think so, but it's a funny question," he says. "Because of course, if it was all information that you got up into a computer... making something feel like Claire, we could have a million of them on a million different machines. And each of them would feel like Claire.

"But immediately, just like twins -- immediately, identical twins start having divergent experiences and becoming different people. And so all the different Claires would immediately start having different experiences and becoming different Claires."

Back in Arizona, with the vision of a million computerized versions of myself enslaving the human race far from my mind, the promise of cryonics still feels like a dream.

I'm walking through the long-term care room as waterfalls of fog cascade from the cryonic chambers. These dewars need to be regularly refilled with liquid nitrogen to make sure patients stay at the perfect temperature, and today's the day they're getting topped up.

As I slowly step through the fog, stainless steel chambers loom large around me. Visibility drops, so I can barely see my outstretched hand in front of my face. For just the tiniest moment, as my feet disappear beneath me and I'm surrounded by reflections on reflections of white vapor, I lose my bearings. I feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience.

Walking through Alcor's long-term preservation room is a surreal experience.

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Cryonics, brain preservation and the weird science of cheating death - CNET

How abolish ICE protests brought abolish the police into the mainstream – Vox.com

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Before thousands of people took to the streets demanding the abolition of police, abolish ICE was the rallying cry of activists protesting the Trump administrations immigration policies.

Democrats on the debate stage were asked about the movement to abolish the agency, also known as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Two candidates made dismantling the agency part of their platform, and those who did not still embraced calls for more aggressive reform. The movement pushed ideas about abolition further into the mainstream, changing the conversation around criminal justice reform.

Activists for police abolition see the two movements as intertwined, and say it isnt a coincidence that both have risen to prominence in recent years.

The activist communities that are involved in engaging people with the idea that we should defund the police or abolish the police or abolish ICE have a lot of cross-fertilization, said Csar Cuauhtmoc Garca Hernndez, a law professor at the University of Denver. These are activists who often are people of color in communities where law enforcement agents of various types have a deleterious effect on them and the people around them. For lots of people who have been doing this work for many years, they view the police and ICE as working hand in hand.

Movements to abolish ICE and the police have amassed significant support. By August 2018, about a quarter of Democrats supported calls to dismantle the agency, and more than half had come to view the agency negatively. Similarly, polls conducted in the wake of recent protests have shown an almost 15 percent increase in support for cuts to law enforcement funding.

It would be wrong to say that the movements messaging has had no impact, Garca Hernndez said. The notion of abolishing ICE has become one worthy of consideration by a much broader segment of society, he said. There has been an enormous shift.

Many of the organizations and movements calling for the abolition of ICE are the same ones that have been working to abolish the police; they see both moves as part of their objective to dismantle repressive law enforcement.

By these activists definition, ICE, which has more than 20,000 agents nationwide, operates as a police force that targets and criminalizes non-white communities.

I dont differentiate between abolishing the police and abolishing ICE, said Monica Mohapatra, one of the authors of #8toAbolition, a platform for police abolition. She listed ICE, along with sheriffs, highway patrol, campus police, school safety guards, corrections officers, and military officers, as among the forms of law enforcement that her group views as toxic.

The calls to abolish the police are informed by the work of migrant rights organizers who have opposed detention and family separations and sought to frame calls to secure the border as a product of American imperialism, Mohapatra added.

Police have long worked in cooperation with ICE to arrest immigrants, leading to their detention and possible deportation. During recent Black Lives Matter protests in Phoenix and New York City, ICE agents worked alongside police to take protesters into custody, even though thats prohibited under the agencys guidelines.

ICE can send a written request to a local jail or other law enforcement entity asking officers to continue to detain immigrants for an additional 48 hours beyond when they would otherwise be released so that the agency can take them into custody and begin deportation proceedings. ICE doesnt need court approval to issue these requests it can do so even if an immigrant isnt facing any pending charges, and without probable cause that they have committed any violation.

ICE has access to a number of federal databases that help it identify immigrants to deport, including those of the Department of Motor Vehicles and the National Crime Information Center. But police can also informally share information with ICE to notify them of someone in their custody whom they suspect may have committed an immigration violation.

For many unauthorized immigrants, coming into contact with police for an offense as minor as a traffic violation could result in their deportation. Advocates have therefore understood the importance of police reform at the local level.

This cooperation between the two agencies is why some states and cities have adopted sanctuary policies barring local law enforcement from complying with detention requests or sharing information. The Supreme Court recently left in place a California law that prevented most state and local law enforcement officials from providing detainees release dates or home addresses to ICE unless its already public information. That law also barred immigrants who have not been convicted of a crime from being transferred to immigration custody absent a court order, with some exceptions.

But those sanctuary policies cant entirely shield immigrants from ICEs reaches, and other states have taken the opposite tack, encouraging cooperation between police and ICE, such as with Arizonas SB 1070. That controversial law was largely struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012, but one provision that still stands requires immigration status checks during law enforcement stops, arrests, and detention.

Immigrant rights activists have been very clear about engaging local elected officials for many years on policing reforms, Garca Hernndez said. [Being stopped] in the street because of a traffic violation or because of some suspicion of criminal activity becomes the key moment that then sets the tone for whether or not this individual ends up in ICEs hands and potentially getting deported.

The movements to abolish the police and to abolish ICE often work in tandem. Some activists work on both causes, and others see their work as ideologically sympathetic.

ICE and the police are built on the same foundation of racism and white supremacy, said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, one of the first organizations to call for abolishing immigration detention.

For police, it was to patrol and catch enslaved people and protect white property and corporations. For ICE as an agency, it was an isolationist and Islamophobic response to the September 11th attacks, she said. The call to abolish ICE is a call to shift away from a system that targets, abuses, and exiles immigrants to one that values migration and human life.

Abolitionist ideas can be traced back to at least the 1960s and 70s, when activists focused on mass incarceration. At the time, abolishing prisons felt almost inevitable, as Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd wrote in the Guardian in 2018. Even a commission created by the Nixon administration, which later went on to espouse a tough on crime stance, proposed the closure of all juvenile prisons and acknowledged overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.

But the ensuing decades brought crackdowns on both crime and immigration. The US experienced a crime wave that peaked in the early 1990s, with violent crimes jumping almost fourfold during that period. The federal government reacted by increasing prison sentences, making it harder to challenge wrongful convictions, enabling police searches and seizures, and enacting strict criminal codes.

As crime dropped in the 90s, the federal government turned its attention to immigration. In 1996, the Clinton administration backed what is now recognized as one of the most punitive immigration laws on the books, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The law, which was touted as centrist at the time, is largely responsible for the federal governments massive detention and deportation engine as it exists today. It laid the groundwork for ICEs creation in 2003 as a response to 9/11.

Immigrant advocates have opposed ICE since its inception, arguing that it has criminalized and unjustly targeted communities of color. But the agency didnt attract widespread scrutiny until Donald Trump came into office and started using the agency to enforce his hardline immigration policies, especially the separation of immigrant families that began in 2018.

The view of the agency as something that was purely malignant really happened after Trump was elected and ramped up interior enforcement in a way that was tied pretty explicitly to the creation of a white ethnostate, said Sean McElwee, the co-founder of nonprofit think tank Data for Progress who is credited with coining the #AbolishICE hashtag.

The abolish ICE movement drew from that of abolishing prisons in developing strategies to defund, shame, and create popular dissent around deportation, Mohapatra said. Leading progressives, most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, popularized the idea of abolishing the agency, bucking the prevailing view of mainstream Democrats at the time who called for keeping the agency intact while reforming it.

Over half of voters in 2018 said they didnt support dismantling ICE, and center-left commentators warned that endorsing the movement would cost Democrats congressional seats in the midterms. But that never came to pass. Instead, the idea became a rallying cry for protesters and eventually worked its way into presidential candidates platforms. Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed breaking up ICE and redistributing its functions to other agencies.

More moderate candidates, meanwhile, positioned themselves against outright abolition while still embracing more aggressive reforms than Democrats had in the past. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said he would keep the agency intact but introduce reforms to improve accountability for ICE officials and limit its ability to target unauthorized immigrants who have not committed any crimes. California Sen. Kamala Harris, who is reportedly on the shortlist to be Bidens running mate, was careful to distinguish between her proposal to complete[ly] overhaul ICE and the calls to abolish it entirely.

Centrist Democrats efforts to distance themselves from the abolish ICE movement, however, have had their advantages: The movement was able to evolve outside the realm of electoral politics and without the baggage of the Democratic brand, McElwee said.

The fact that politicians wont even come close to touching it has given a lot of freedom, he said. If Biden embraced it, it would become much more polarized and partisan, whereas as it is now, its sort of a vision for a different society. That allows you to change peoples hearts and minds.

Advocates of abolition say their goal isnt just to shift the Overton window, the range of ideas that the public is willing to consider. They urge people to take them at their word when they say they want to dismantle the police and ICE.

When Detention Watch Network started advocating for abolishing detention in 2012, the idea was not the norm for the criminal justice reform movement, Shah said. But over time, the advocacy community began to embrace the idea of abolition rather than reforming a system that they believe harms and punishes immigrants, especially since it was an idea that originated in the communities most impacted by oppressive law enforcement.

To actualize our vision, to move us forward, we have to talk about the world we want to see, Shah said. Today we have people talking about the issues in ways that seemed far-fetched just a few weeks ago. There is a lot of self-education happening, a lot of conversations, and a lot of action. I dont think we can discount the role of powerful slogans in that respect.

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How abolish ICE protests brought abolish the police into the mainstream - Vox.com

Abolition: ‘They said what they said’ – injusticewatch.org

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Six abolitionists joined Injustice Watch on June 29 for a virtual salon conversation about abolition hosted by audience engagement manager Charles Preston (top-center).

Organizers and activists calling to abolish the prison-industrial complex and other carceral systems is not a new phenomenon. However, in recent months, abolition, an ideological framework long considered as a radical solution to systemic oppression and violence, is gaining momentum and attracting mainstream attention as protests against racism and police violence continue.

With more attention comes more skepticism, misrepresentation, and misinterpretation about what abolition truly means today. The general public, journalists, elected officials, and even activists fighting for police accountability can be subject to or perpetuate the problem.

To educate ourselves, and our readers, Injustice Watch hosted a conversation with six abolitionists entitled Abolition: They said what they said. The title comes from a recent commentary we published by community organizer and public policy consultant Amara Enyia. Our guests were: Timmy Chau, Monica Cosby, Hoda Katebi, Jasson Perez, Lisa Sangoi, and Ric Wilson.

We wanted to give you the opportunity to hear about abolition directly from abolitionists. Below is a snapshot of our hour-long conversation with our guests that has been edited for length and clarity.

Jasson Perez

Jasson Perez organizes with Afro-Socialists & Socialists of Color Caucus and is a senior research analyst at the Action Center on Race and the Economy focusing on the areas of police violence, mass incarceration, and economic inequality.

Jasson Perez

At its most basic level [abolition] is having a world without carceral institutions, like prisons and jails and police. But then that means a lot of things, especially when it comes to solutions around what we call public safety and in response to the things that we call violent crime and then crime in general. I look at abolition, not just as the elimination of police and prisons, but also the elimination of the conditions that cause what we understand to be violent harm in our society. Usually, people [just] think of the most extreme examples of violence: murder, rape, and then usually some forms of like strong-arm robbery, things like that.

We would have to change how our economy is organized, how our political system is organized, and then a lot of things like how our even social and cultural industry is organized, in order to have an abolitionist world. But a first step to that is fighting against police power and prison power.

Monica Cosby

Monica Cosby

Monica Cosby is an organizer for Mothers United Against Violence and Incarceration. She describes herself as: Im a grandma dreaming & building a world in which my grandbabies, all of us, can live freely.

We have to leave room for people to learn. I think thats really important. I think a lot of times that, depending on the space Im in, Ill talk about abolition without actually saying the word. So, when you tell people [that] everybody deserves housingits not even a matter of deserving. Its a right of the people. You tell people you believe everyone should have housing, you believe health care should be for all people, all of these things. People are always like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, say abolition, theyre like, Oh, no, but what do we do about the bad people?

When I was growing up, if I did something, if I even looked like I was going to do something, there was some grown person somewhere that was going to go tell my mom or my dad. It was that way of taking care of each other in community, and dealing with harm when it happens, in ways that are not dependent on the stateIts happening now in all kinds of places, and it always has, so lets just go beyond that.

Its also teaching out violence. Its getting rid of the violence of the state, but its also not codifying, or coddling violence, especially interpersonal violence, and domestic violence.

Lisa Sangoi

Lisa Sangoi

Lisa Sangoi is co-founder and co-director at Movement for Family Power.

This is something I have been having a deep craving to do more reading about: It seems to me that abolition is not a destination, but just a constant sort of work-in-progress. I dont imagine theres any perfect future that we, or future generations, will occupy.

Maybe thats just pessimistic of me, but I think of it less as a destination and more as a calling in terms of how we do the work, and how we are in relation with each other, and how we build.

Timmy Chau

Timmy Chu

Timmy Chu is an abolitionist, co-director of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, and co-founder of Dissenters.

For me, the basic ideais trying to move through the world and envision a world without policing and prison and carceral apparatuses.

Its not just about the institutions of policing and prison, but also the logic and ideological frameworks that justify prisons and policing and what they representthe impulse to control, dominate, disappear communities, and harm communities.

Those are all also logics that play out, not just in policing and prisons themselves, but also in other institutions.

Hoda Katebi

Hoda Katebi

Hoda Katebi is an Iranian-American writer & creative, founding member of Blue Tin Production, host of #BecauseWeveRead, and organizer with Believers Bail Out and the No War Campaign.

I think that abolition, at its core, is the understanding that human life has value intrinsically, and human lives arent disposable, and were holistic capable beings

But its also how we interact with each other, how we hold each other accountable, how the state violence is replicated in our relationships on an intimate level in dealing with each other, from children to parents to even friends, and how were holding each other accountable and creating the world that we want to see both in terms of institutions and in terms of just our neighborhoods. Something that, for me, has been particularly striking, these past few weeks especially, is how we, in order to really be ready for systemic abolition, need to at least know who our neighbors are.

If we want to be able to hold each other accountable in a way thats holistic and caring and from love, we need to be able to have that love and have that trust and view each other as humans. But like, Im guilty of not even knowing who lives across from me.

Ric Wilson

Ric Wilson

Ric Wilson is a recording and performing Artist, Abolitionist, and Lover.

I was 16, and I became a Chicago Freedom Fellow. I have a big huge love for history, so Mia Henry and Mariame Kaba gave me a bunch of books to read.

It didnt really hit until I was stuck up and robbed by somebody that lived around where my cousin lived, and I went through a whole system of identifying them. It was these two cousins, they were 14 and 15, and I went through the whole court [process] thinking that Id get my stuff back that I got stolen from me.

And after I pointed them out, they went into juvie, and I didnt get anything back. I didnt feel good after that.

From there, I [thought] theres got to be some different-ass way to deal with this shit that happens to me. Then I also realized that the police, theyre not fucking for us. Thats what kind of got me into just thinking this shit is fucked up, and this shit is not for us. Thats my little story.

Monica Cosby

Well, some of it is from me being in prison for 20 years, but even before thenI have always been in Chicago and I have seen, since I was a kid, what the police do. I know that theyre not for us. I can remember the police coming and dragging my dad to jail.

Its people that I follow on Twitter that I learn from. Theres folks that, if they put something up, Yall should check out this article. Listen to this podcast, thats what I do. Theres like Kelly Hayes, Mariame [Kaba], of course, Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Im learning a different language for a lot of stuff that I already felt, with what Ive already been believing and feeling, and work that Ive been doing. There are new things that Im learning and new approaches.

Lisa Sangoi

We definitely hear about abolition, or even defunding, in terms of prisons [and] police. The carceral, really, deeply, deeply racist and fucked up nature of our society runs deep, way, way, way, way, way beyond prisons and police. I would say the foster system, child welfare agents. This is just one small example of many, many, many carceral institutions.

I think a big part of abolition is its transforming our very conception of violence and harm.

Jasson Perez

In terms of how abolition is looked at in the media, defund police is doing for abolition what Medicare for All did for socialism. Medicare for All, in and of itself, isnt a socialist project or isnt necessarily socialist in any meaningful way. But its something that socialists organize around and then connect it to the larger, broader ideas of what socialism is, at its core democratizing the economy, not just government support for things, but democratizing all things that deal with the economy.

So I feel like defund the police is that. When it comes to the medias understandings of it, that is our job. Thats our work as organizers, as change-makers, as influencers, whatever, however, you want to call it, as musicians, to make that clear to people. I think a part of how we get there is giving people tangible decarceral options of how to get there. I think defund the police is part of it.

Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly said that all six participants in our salon event were based in the Chicago area. Lisa Sangoi is based in Washington, D.C.

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Abolition: 'They said what they said' - injusticewatch.org

Jo Johnson: Dont betray the next generation of creatives – Evening Standard

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Creative industries in London and across the country should celebrate Mondays Home Office announcement of the new Graduate Route visa.

The timing could hardly be better. These are crucial days in the university admissions cycle: anxious international students holding offers at London's engines of creativity - whether coding at Imperial, fashion textiles at UAL or graphic design at the RCA - are making final decisions on whether to come this academic year.

The confirmation of a massive boost to our post-study work offer should encourage many waverers to enrol this September.

International students completing a degree here from summer 2021 onwards will be able to stay on for two years (three years for PhDs) and work at any skill level. They will also be eligible to switch into work routes and stay on longer if they find a suitable job. And there will be no limit on the number of international students who can come to the UK each year.

The impact this will have in countries like India, where the duration of post-study work is a critical factor, could be sensational. It will help defend the UKs competitive position, which has suffered gravely from Theresa Mays abolition of the post-study work visa in 2012 (following the mistaken inclusion of students in the now abandoned 100,000 net migration target).

The UKs market share has fallen from 12% in 2012 to below 8 per cent, with countries such as Canada gaining at our expense.

Coming days after Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden announced a 1.6bn rescue package for Britains arts and heritage sectors, this is encouraging evidence of joined-up policy in support of the creative industries. And rightly so.

Up until the Coronavirus struck, they were growing at five times the rate of the economy and generating around 15 per cent of national gross value-added. Enabling historic palaces, museums, galleries, live music and independent cinema to access emergency grants and loans while their doors are closed is a no-brainer.

For policy to be fully joined up, however, the Department for Education must take care over how it operates recently re-imposed domestic student number controls. This risks turning into a crude process to allocate places - and therefore funding - on the basis of flawed measures of graduate earnings. This would unfairly penalise creative arts courses already in the cross-hairs of higher education sceptics in Parliament fired up by Gavin Williamsons denunciation of the Blair-era target for 50 per cent of young people to go to university. If we have learnt anything lately, it is to value socially useful but lower-earning professions.

It would be incoherent to open the door to international talent to work across our economy, while restricting opportunities for domestic students to prepare themselves for careers in the arts. An economic nonsense too: the creative industries were generating 13 million for the economy every hour before Covid-19 enough to repay the subsidy to arts courses in the student loan book many times over.

Our creative industries will only recover if we supply them with the skills and talent vital for their success.

Jo Johnson, former Universities Minister, is Chairman of Tes Global

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Jo Johnson: Dont betray the next generation of creatives - Evening Standard

"Free Them All" Rally Targets Whalley Jail – New Haven Independent

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Paul Ciccarelli walked out of the Whalley Avenue jail and into freedom to find himself greeted by three dozen protesters rallying for the release of more inmates during the Covid-19 pandemic.

We love you, stay strong! the protesters sang. We love you, stay strong!

That was the scene Monday afternoon on Hudson Street outside of the western entrance to the New Haven Correctional Center at 245 Whalley Ave.

Roughly 40 people from New Haven, Bridgeport, New London, and Hamden marched from County Street to Goffe Street and over to Hudson as part of a Free Them All demonstration organized by the Connecticut Bail Fund and New London Building It Together along with formerly incarcerated people and their families.

As they marched on foot, another dozen people drove in a car caravan around the state jail, honking and cheering to let those on the inside know that the protesters were outside and rallying on their behalf.

Ciccarelli, a 51-year-old North Haven resident, didnt know that the protest would be taking place at the same time that he happened to be released from the state jail after more than two years on the inside.

Holding a brown paper bag filled with his belongings and wearing a light blue surgical mask wrapped around his mouth and nose, Ciccarelli was in shock.

Its overwhelming, he said. To be greeted the way I was just greeted. It feels really good.

Instead, they were there as part of the CT Bail Funds months-long campaign to pressure the state to reduce Connecticuts prison population and enact a host of reforms designed to protect inmates during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mondays protest organizers called for the state to release at least half of the the state Department of Corrections (DOC) current incarcerated population because of the near impossibility of practicing social distancing, improve hygiene at existing facilities, enforce mask wearing among correctional staff, and establish new independent review bodies for everything from sentence modifications to sexual assault complaint investigations. (A complete list of their demands appears later in this article.)

Richardson said that the Bail Funds demands werent pulled from thin air. Rather, they are based on comments and concerns that Bail Fund prison hotline volunteers have heard directly from inmates over the past four months as theyve called to check in on conditions in prisons and jails throughout the state.

Four of those hotline volunteers put together a scathing written assessment of conditions at the New Haven jail in particular based on their conversations with inmates. A DOC spokesperson denied several of the allegations included in the report, and heralded the extraordinary job that DOC has done so far at protecting inmates while also reducing the states prison population by more than 2,500 people in the last few months. See more below.

When asked about conditions on the inside, he chuckled to himself.

Id rather eat off this street than some of the stuff inside there, he said.

Food complaints aside, Ciccarelli said that the prison staff did a mixed job in protecting inmates like himself from Covid.

He said that he received a care package with shampoo, soap, deodorant, and toothpaste every two weeks. (He said he believed that package came from a donation from Yale, though he wasnt sure.)

Prison staff would hand out one new, washable cloth face covering to each inmate every two weeks. Earlier in the pandemic, he said, staff handed masks out just once a month.

Ciccarelli said he knew 12 fellow inmates among the 51 detained in his cell block who contracted Covid-19. He said they were all sent to a quarantine unit, some at the states supermax Northern Correctional Institution and some at the Whalley jail itself. Theyre not really using Northern anymore because its inhumane, he said.

Conditions need to be better, he said. The air conditioning needs to be on more. And they need to give us hand sanitizer.

He said that the medical care overall was sufficient at the jail. The majority of the nurses down there are spot on, he said. But, like anywhere, you always have a few that arent.

And he said that, after a little debacle of failure to keep Covid-symptomatic inmates separated from the rest of the population towards the beginning of the pandemic, the prison staff ultimately did a good job at moving Covid-positive people into a quarantine unit and only reintegrating them into the general population when they were no longer sick.

Things are supposed to be starting to change, he said about the prison taking more safety measures and releasing more inmates in response to the states settlement of a recent class action lawsuit with the ACLU regarding how best to protect older inmates and those with preexisting conditions who are most vulnerable to suffering adverse consequences from Covid.

But he wont get to see those firsthand, Ciccarelli said, because hes now a free man. His initial plan was to go home to North Haven, and then see if he can find someone to give him a ride so he can visit his late fathers burial spot in town.

According to state judicial records, Ciccarelli was arrested and detained in 2018 for possessing child pornography.

She called for the abolition of the existing prison system, the police, and even the public education system as it currently exists. They all systematically oppress Black people, she said, and need to be fundamentally reconfigured.

She said he describes the conditions there as horrible, and that she worries about him every day because he has asthma and is therefore uniquely vulnerable to suffering serious health consequences if he contracts Covid.

She said she feels buoyed by knowing that shes not alone in thinking about, worrying about, and advocating for her son while hes behind bars.

Something like this gives me hope, she said about Mondays protest.

He said he spent 12-and-a-half years locked up in Corrigan and MacDougall state prisons. And he said he still has friends who are behind bars in Connecticut.

Santiago said that, based on his experience and his friends experience, state prisons are not safe places to be during a pandemic. He said he showed up Monday to show his support for those still on the inside, and stand in solidarity with other prison reformers and abolitionists.

Their assessment, based on four months of conversations with people incarcerated in New Haven and throughout the state, is scathing. Click here to read their full report.

The stories we have heard from those inside Connecticuts cages describe an approach that is at best systematic negligence and at worst state-sanctioned murder, they wrote about the DOCs efforts to protect the states incarcerated population so far. In either case, it is a complete abdication of responsibility for the extrajudicial death sentences being meted out to the overwhelmingly Black, Brown, and poor peoples incarcerated in Connecticut.

The state is re-opening while the worst of the pandemic still rages inside its prisons and jails. And though prisons have walls, people do leave: Incarcerated people travel to, from, and through the carceral system, and staff return to their communities. In fact, the virus has only been able to enter these facilities because COs [correctional officers] and other DOC staff introduced it and because police continue to arrest and incarcerate community members, spreading sickness among those trapped inside.

They wrote that the hotline has received numerous reports of horrifying conditions from inmates inside of the Whalley jail.

According to the hotline volunteers, NHCC inmates were routinely denied tests and access to medical care despite showing symptoms of Covid-19 in March. They said that, for months, testing involved only temperature checks and not viral swabs or antibody tests.

COs, they said, were not required to wear masks. And by the time the NHCC started distributing masks made from prison uniforms which were so inadequate that people wrapped T-shirts around their faces instead in early April, six COs, a mail handler, and a nurse had already tested positive.

The hotline volunteers wrote that the NHCC responded to those positive staff tests by implementing a lockdown. They wrote that people were allowed outside their cells for only 40 minutes a day for recreation, phone calls, and showering.

NHCC unconscionably replaced part of the kitchen staff with COs, they wrote, people who travel to and from the facility daily but are still not required to get tested or screened.

The report quotes one inmate who continued working a shift on the kitchen staff as saying, In late March, early April, I went down Im a kitchen worker I went down to get my temperature taken before work, and my temperature was at 100.3 degrees. They cleared me to go to work for the day.

They also wrote that the jail experienced a slew of plumbing problems during lockdown, during which toilets began to spew sewage.

They said that cellmates received access to a single hotel-sized bar of soap per cell every two weeks.

Vents blew dirty air throughout the facility, rotten food was served, and the commissary was largely shut down, they wrote. People with asthmawere denied access to their inhalers, medication was withheld, and medical requests were routinely ignored.

The hotline volunteers wrote that DOC staff ignored or did not respond quickly in providing medical care for those who did display Covid-19 symptoms. On at least two occasions, they wrote, symptomatic prisoners had to wait until they could not walk or were coughing up blood to receive any acknowledgment of their illness from DOC.

They also laid into the DOC for its policy of sending Covid-sick inmates to the states super-maximum security prison, Northern, where they were placed in solitary confinement until their symptoms abated or they died.

They wrote that, as more people became sick, they became more and more terrified to report their illness out of a fear of being sent to Northern.

They said one caller told them, If you get sick and you go to Northern, youre gonna end up dying.

The hotline volunteers wrote that people with positive and negative test results, meanwhile, were placed together on the same block or in the same cell. New people brought into NHCC were immediately placed in the general population without any period of quarantine, they wrote. Healthy people successfully grouped together were crowded into a single block and forced to eat thirty at a time in confined quarters.

They wrote that the DOC conducted a facility-wide Covid-19 test in New Haven on June 2. They said this was a viral swab, and not an antibody test. Whatever data the DOC has collected about infection rates at NHCC are likely deflated and distorted, they wrote, and anyone who was sick in March, April or May will not show up as positive if they received only a viral swab.

While they wash their hands of the violence theyve overseen, the disastrous conditions persist at NHCC, they continued, and all calls weve received in June and July indicate that, despite facility-wide testing, little to nothing is being done to address the lethal situation inside.

The hotline volunteers wrote that, despite the state prison systems overall reduction in population during the pandemic, the population at NHCC rose in May from 603 to 681.

This cruelty cannot be overstated, they wrote, especially when the overwhelming majority of NHCCs population are Black, Brown, and poorpeople who experience conditions like asthma, high blood pressure, and diabetes at greater rates due to environmental racism and the violence of poverty.

The hotline volunteers conclude the report by listing the bail funds demands of the state. Those include: a 50 percent reduction of the states current incarcerated population by the end of 2020; an independent review of sentence modifications; an independent review of allegations of sexual and physical abuse against incarcerated people; a legal resource center in every facility; an end to the denial of parole, transitional supervision, halfway house eligibility, and other forms of release; the restoration of visits, weekly distribution of personal hygiene supplies; and functional disinfectant products; fines for any DOC staff not wearing masks; and medical care for incarcerated people released after contracting Covid-19 while behind state bars.

We know that all of these demands are steps along the road to the abolition of the prison industrial complex and the massive re-direction of resources into Black and Brown communities, they wrote. We need no less if we want truly healthy communities, now and beyond the pandemic.

This record of the violence inside NHCC exists because of the courage of incarcerated people and the people who love them. They are the ones speaking up on the phones and in the streets. They are the ones risking retaliation by CT DOC while enduring the everyday violence of incarceration. The family and friends of incarcerated people fear for the safety of their loved ones inside as much as they fear for the safety of their loved ones outside, struggling with illness, unemployment, and police brutality. The people who call us have dreams and desires to live healthy and free, to return and contribute to their communities. But they fear they will die of COVID-19 before they have the chance.

Below is a response from DOC Director of External Affairs Karen Martucci to Mondays protest and to the CT Bail Funds report on conditions at the Whalley jail.

When faced with challenges associated with COVID-19, the first responders from the Connecticut Department of Correction did an extraordinary job.

A preparedness plan was quickly established which included enhanced cleaning efforts, the separation of new intakes for 14 days, screening protocols for both the incarcerated population and employees, and the establishment of both quarantine and medical isolation units.

In addition to the safeguards put into place at the onset of the pandemic, the agency focused on the safe release of eligible offenders, while prioritizing offenders that were considered high risk if exposed to the virus based on CDC guidelines.

As a result of these efforts, Connecticut witnessed a significant drop in the incarcerated population which ranked the state as a national leader in these efforts. Since March, the agency has reduced the population by more than 2,500 people.

Allegations that offenders were not seen until they were vomiting blood and that the agency placed positive and negative cases in the same cell are not only false, they are insulting to the dedicated correctional professionals that answered the call to duty and reported to work day in and day out of the crisis.

We continue to collaborate with the Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ensure we are taking measures to best protect our selfless employees and the incarcerated population.

Below is a list of the 10 demands put forth by Bail Fund organizers during Mondays protest.

1) Initiate large-scale decarceration, coupled with public divestment from the prison industrial complex and reinvestment in Black communities. Social distancing is impossible in every facility in CT. Because of DOC negligence and abuse, thousands have been infected and many have even died. The state must create a comprehensive plan to immediately release at least 50% of its incarcerated population.

2) Establish a new body and a new process, independent of the Office of the States Attorney, to review Sentence Modifications and other similar motions. This body should be accountable to communities, not law enforcement. Presently, the same individuals who have imposed excessive sentences on our community members are the ones reviewing them.

3) Create a legal resource center in every facility. Due to the fact that the courts are severely backed up with cases, incarcerated people should have legal resources to help them understand their defense options and prepare their legal advocacy. Presently, no such resources exist, and the vast majority of prisoners have, in practice, no legal rights available to them through a court of law.

4) Restore visits. This can be accomplished in a safe way, especially with conducting visits in outside spaces and ensuring the ample availability of PPE.

5) DOC should ensure the provision of medical after-care for anyone who contracted COVID-19 while incarcerated.

6) Immediately stop denying people parole, Transitional Supervision, halfway house eligibility, and other forms of release from incarceration.

7) Provide personal hygiene supplies on a weekly basis to everyone incarcerated. Stop lying to the public about the provision of these supplies inside facilities.

8) Mandate that everyone incarcerated is able to clean their living area whenever they want. Presently, cleaning is not possible, and disinfectant supplies have been severely watered down to the point of uselessness.

9) Mandate that all DOC staff keep their masks on while in the facility. If they are found to be breaking this rule, they should be immediately sent home from their shift and fined.

10) DOC should have an independent body investigate all allegations of sexual and physical abuse against incarcerated people. The State of CT has yet to acknowledge the wide-spread brutality being visited upon its incarcerated residents.

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"Free Them All" Rally Targets Whalley Jail - New Haven Independent

Dave Hill: The Tories have little chance of winning City Hall. Are they now plotting its… – onlondon.co.uk

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Conservatism is in trouble in the capital and now desperate Tories are lobbying to reduce the powers of a Mayor whose policies they don't like

There is, of course, precedent for this type of thing. In 1986, affronted by the impertinence of Ken Livingstone, Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher completed the abolition of the Greater London Council, the city-wide body which had grappled for 21 years with the capitals huge housing, transport and pollution problems. For half of its existence Tories had run the GLC, but Livingstones leadership of it since 1981 had driven The Iron Lady mad. Arguments mustered for expunging it included that the capitals 32 boroughs could do the GLCs jobs in a more streamlined way. Critics rightly said the true motivation was political pique. Are some of todays Conservatives dreaming of repeating history?

The eight-strong London Assembly Conservative Group and is not without strengths: the experience of Tony Arbour; the precision of Gareth Bacon; the independence of Andrew Boff. Their colleague Tony Devenish is, for all I know, immensely kind to animals and a more rounded individual than his sometimes peevish public manner suggests, but an article he has written for Conservative Home fails to elevate him to that select blue Assembly pantheon.

It pains him, you understand, to advocate inspectors replacing the Greater London Authority, set up under Tony Blair in 1999 as an (admittedly cautious) revival of London-wide government, but he regrets that it will have to be done. The problem, you see, is, welland here Devenishs case begins to look a little thin. It offers no agenda for enhanced devolved powers, perhaps along the lines so keenly advocated by Boris Johnson when he was London Mayor: control over the spending of property taxes; more funds for affordable housing; full TfL regulation of suburban rail. It provides no vision of how a post-Covid, post-Brexit engine room of the UK economy would function and thrive better under a Tory Mayor. It just moans a lot about Sadiq Khan.

There are respectable critiques of Mayor Khans first term performance and, to be fair to Devenish, he briefly touches on one of these: it is true that some, including Labour borough leaders, find Khan personally distant, politically over-defensive and insufficiently interested in the larger strategic themes that brought the best out in Livingstone when he was restored to the head of London government in 2000. It is also felt in some broadly sympathetic quarters that Mayor Khan has been too quick to pick fights with the government when a more co-operative approach might have produced better results for the city.

But mostly Devenish just wildly over-claims for Johnsons eight years as Mayor and lists a bunch of Khan policies he happens not to like, indulging freely in the electioneering claptrap we seem destined to have to live with from his Assembly colleague, the Tory mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey, from now until the postponed mayoral election day. (It is, to repeat, utter rubbish to blame Khan for the congestion charge going up and operating for longer hours. The government required this as a condition of its financial bailout of TfL and could have vetoed the details had it wished to unless, of course, the letter of 14 May from Grant Shapps setting all this out was, in fact, an unusually subtle work of political satire which got sent to the wrong address by mistake).

Thats the problem with elections: sometimes your side loses. And the problem Tories in London have had throughout this century is that theyve been losing a lot more than they have won. Even at last years general election, when Jeremy Corbyns clueless Labour was being evicted from parliamentary seats all over England, the Tories could not improve on their meagre London haul of 21 out of 73. Johnsons mayoral wins in 2008 and 2012 were unusually good days at the ballot box. Bailey has trailed spectacularly in every mayoral opinion poll theres been. The Tories are in deep electoral disfavour across most of the very capital of the nation they run. Could it really be that some of them think the solution to their City Hall problem is to re-enact Thatchers folly? Or at least to stealthily so reduce mayoral autonomy that much the same thing is achieved?

It is striking that Devenish applauds the Johnsons governments recent clod-hopping intrusions into City Hall affairs, including by the unfortunate Robert Jenrick. Last month, the Telegraph more of a Boris Johnson fanzine than ever of late raised the question of abolition on its comment page. You cant help wondering if some of the several Mayor Johnson lieutenants now ensconced in and around 10 Downing Street are having similar not very bright ideas. After all, like Devenish, some them appear to honestly believe their bosss generally indifferent eight-year City Hall tenure was an unrepeatable triumph and that London really would be much better off were it back under their remote control.

Post-Covid, Brexit Britain needs more devolution not less and not only to London, if it is serious about levelling up. As for Londons Tories, they would serve themselves and their city better by giving some overdue thought to how to get more Londoners to vote for them.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair, thorough, and resolutely anti-populist news, comment and analysis about the UKs capital city. It now depends more than ever on donations from readers. Give 5 a month or 50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up news, views and information from a wide range of sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

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Dave Hill: The Tories have little chance of winning City Hall. Are they now plotting its... - onlondon.co.uk

More Closures As Coronavirus Surges, San Diego Unified Goes Online For Fall, And Community Conversation: The Future Of Policing (KPBS Midday Edition)…

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As coronavirus cases surge in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered closures of gyms, salons, churches and other indoor operations. What has to happen before the closures are reversed? Plus, defying President Trump, San Diego Unified and LAUSD Californias two largest school districts announced they start the school year with distance learning. After the police killing of George Floyd demonstrators in San Diego took to the streets to call for change. But can community members and law enforcement in San Diego agree on what reform measures and policy changes are necessary?

Speaker 1: 00:00 San Diego hunkers down again. As many indoor businesses are ordered closed,

Speaker 2: 00:05 Right? If we don't retain control of the spread of coronavirus, it threatens the entirety of our economy.

Speaker 1: 00:11 I'm Maureen Cavenaugh with Mark sour. This is KPBS day edition. The County revises COVID testing guidelines because supplies are getting tight. San Diego unified prepares to get back to school online. And we'll bring you highlights from last night's KPBS community forum on policing

Speaker 2: 00:38 The so-called reforms. If you actually read them, don't sound much like reforms to me at all. If anything, it sounds like, um, a statement saying that they're already doing things correctly. They'll continue to do things correctly.

Speaker 1: 00:52 That, and more ahead on midday edition,

Speaker 1: 01:00 San Diego was forced to take a step back on Monday as governor Gavin Newsome ordered all indoor operations in gyms, houses of worship non-critical office businesses, hair salons, and personal care services to close. Once again, the move was prompted by a continuing increase in COVID-19 cases. The overall number of cases in San Diego County passed the 20,000 Mark on Monday as cases spike the need for testing increases, but San Diego health officials also had some bad news on that topic. Yesterday, San Diego's testing capacity is decreasing because of an overburdened supply chain. The result County testing will be reserved for people who have symptoms and not for anyone who wants one. Joining me is KPBS health reporter, Taran, mento, and Taran. Welcome to the program. Thanks Maureen. Now, San Diego, wasn't the only County in California that had to take a step back and reopening how much of the state was also impacted.

Speaker 1: 02:02 Yeah, it's more than three quarters of the state's population. About 80%. There's about 29 counties give or take a few as more might be added, but all of the counties in Southern California, LA orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, we're all on there. How are our County officials responding to the governor's order? Well, yesterday's a news conference supervisor, Nathan Fletcher acknowledged the hardship that these businesses are experiencing. You know, they were only just recently allowed to reopen. After months of shutdown, probably had to spend a lot of money getting these safety measures in place to be able to open safely. And now they're being closed down again. So he, he acknowledged that it is a hardship, um, but he felt it was necessary because if we take these measures now, um, to protect public health, it could also protect our county's fiscal health in the long run

Speaker 2: 02:53 Rest assured I don't believe that anyone takes any, any steps lightly. And it is with a great sense of understanding that if we don't retain control of the spread of coronavirus, it threatens the entirety of our economy. Uh, and so these are unfortunate steps, uh, steps that we're certainly gonna have a negative economic impact on your business. Uh, but the things that the state of California believes we must do in order to reign in control of the spread, uh, so that we can hopefully resume and be in a good position. Moving forward,

Speaker 3: 03:21 Supervisor Jim Desmond has been a vocal opponent to the shutdown orders. Um, he was very against it. It's another round of shutdowns and, and was critical because he said, you know, hospitalizations in San Diego County has not been increasing, even though the governor has been saying statewide, they've been increasing. And this is kind of the issue because shutdown orders from Fletcher's perspective are intended to prevent the virus from spreading so much that we are overwhelming our healthcare system with hospitalization. So Fletcher did acknowledge that sometimes these shut down orders are coming before they're painfully obvious what has to happen before these closures can be reversed. So in San Diego County, we have to significantly reduce the spread, the community spread that's the trigger or the metric that the state is tracking. That seems to go County has been flagged for it's our case rate. So the state wants case rates to be, you know, no more than 100 per 100,000 residents.

Speaker 3: 04:18 San Diego is about one, one 37 per 100,000. So we would have to significantly reduce the spread of infections in the community in order to, um, for the state to reevaluate and lift these restrictions. But right now, as all we know is that they are there in place indefinitely previously, when we just had that first round of closures was supposed to be after three weeks, we'll reassess. All we know now at this point is that it's indefinitely. And why are we back in this situation with a limited number of COVID tests, right? This goes back to those supply chain issues that we heard about, you know, way early in the pandemic, because we are seeing cases, uh, surge, not just in senior County, not just in California, but in a couple of other key States in the country, you know, Texas, Arizona, and Florida, or some of those that have been mentioned when you have more people testing positive, you have more people that are seeking test.

Speaker 3: 05:09 Um, there's more demand. And then that means that resources become limited as more States and jurisdictions are trying to meet this demand because we've also scaled up our testing. So we've had a greater demand. We have a larger volume of testing that was being offered, but a greater need and therefore limited resources being distributed across these States where we're seeing surges. And one of you heard, what has it been like in recent days for people trying to get tested at County sites here in San Diego? So the director of health and human services, Nick meshy on himself has said, some people have had to wait five to seven days just to get an appointment. Um, you know, and then some people are talking about five to seven days longer to get results. You're talking about from the time you get tested at the time that you know, whether you have virus to be about two weeks.

Speaker 3: 05:59 And I know I spoke to a local protest organizer who actually went to not a County cause I went to CVS and it took 11 days, including weekends, 11 days to get her results back. This is being kind of a, a leg affecting, not just County sites, but other sites as well. What exactly are the new guidelines for getting a County test? Right? So one of the ways that the County is trying to address this as limiting, um, those individuals who can sign up for an appointment at the county's, um, testing sites. And so that's going to be limited to symptomatic people. Previously, people could get a test, no matter what their symptoms were, but now it's less limited to symptomatic individuals and high risk people. So people who are asymptomatic, but may work in a healthcare setting or may have a chronic disease, or may be in a nursing care and nursing facility, um, where we we've known a lot of outbreaks to, to be linked back to. I've been speaking with KPBS health reporter, Teran, mento, and Taran. Thank you. Thanks Maureen.

Speaker 4: 07:02 After months of grappling with the vexing challenge of reopening schools in a pandemic San Diego unified shut down, the idea of returning to classrooms for now, the school year will start as the last one finished online. Joining me to examine the details of this decision is KPBS education reporter Joe Hong, Joe, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. We'll start with the decision itself. It was made in conjunction with the LA school district and instruction. We'll start on August 31st as originally planned, but what were some of the factors cited preventing students and teachers from going back into classrooms now? So the two main things that a district cited were the rising infection rates. They want to see a consistent drop in case numbers before reopening schools. And the second component was testing capacity. Um, the districts don't feel like that the local governments are providing enough COVID tests to safely reopen. Ideally you want to have on demand testing for both students and staff. I spoke with Richard Berrera who's on the school board, and here's what he gets.

Speaker 3: 08:08 The countries that we see schools reopening are countries that have brought the virus under control until we do that as a society, we're going to continue to be in this situation where schools are having to balance risks, that we shouldn't be trying to balance.

Speaker 4: 08:26 And how many students are affected by this decision and our students at charter schools in the same boat. Yeah. So Ella unified in San Diego unified are the two biggest, and it's more than 700,000 students who are going to be affected by this decision, both at traditional schools, as well as charter schools and some other local districts have made similar decisions already, is it likely most will follow San Diego Unified's lead on this? Uh, we're sort of across the spectrum right now. I mean, between San Diego unified and Ella unified, just geographically there's, uh, orange County, uh, where that school district has, you know, is pushing forward with reopening and is not even a requiring masks. So there's really no sort of way to tell where all of these districts are gonna land.

Speaker 5: 09:19 Now, this obviously will have a direct impact on jobs, the San Diego economy, the prospect of parents returning to work or trying to work from home if possible. Uh, it seems too soon to really understand all the implications of this decision. Right,

Speaker 4: 09:33 Right. But I think educators right now they're really, they're really emphasizing the fact that opening schools really is the foundation to effectively rebooting the economy. And so if we want to reopen schools, it's really going to take a community effort to lower these infection rates, uh, through social distancing. And, you know, just kind of going back to where we were, uh, in the earlier months of this pandemic.

Speaker 5: 10:00 Now this decision by two of the nation's largest school districts goes directly against the insistence by president Trump and education, secretary Betsy DeVos to reopen classrooms immediately, they threatened her withhold federal funding. Is that a major concern for local districts and making this decision?

Speaker 4: 10:17 Yeah. So look, I think educators right now are really focused on listening to the experts and the scientists to figure out once reopened schools and that political pressure doesn't seem like, uh, something that's gonna really work. Um, just because student safety and teacher safety is what comes first. And federal funding really makes up about 10% of overall school funding. So it wouldn't be a huge hit for San Diego unified. And again, uh, when you compare that to the risk to public health and safety, it's, it's, you know, not even really a question for them,

Speaker 5: 10:55 The district is upfront about how disappointing this is for everybody. Uh, what are they saying about when it might be possible to return to the classroom in some way?

Speaker 4: 11:04 Right. So at San Diego unified, they've teamed up with UC San Diego and public health experts there to sort of come up with a localized plan for when it'll be safe to reopen. Because, you know, as we all know, there's guidances coming from the federal government, the state government and local County governments, and it can be tough to sort of reconcile all that. So, uh, by August 10th, uh, the team at San Diego unified, uh, in partnership with UCLA should have a better idea of when the schools will be able to reopen. Um, and if not, at the very least, they'll have a better understanding of what needs to happen before schools can reopen what case numbers need to look like, what hospitalization numbers need to look like and things like that. I've been speaking KPBS education

Speaker 5: 11:54 Reporter Joe Hong. Thanks, Joe. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 12:03 This is KPBS mid day edition. I'm Maureen Cavenaugh with Mark Sauer for the first time. And on-duty San Diego law enforcement officer has been arraigned on charges of murder in connection with an officer involved shooting former San Diego County Sheriff's deputy Aaron Russell faces. Second degree murder charges for the shooting death of Nicholas bills. Last may. The district attorney's office says Bill's escape custody and was running away at the time of the shooting. Aaron Russell was arraigned in superior court this morning. He pleaded not guilty. Here's deputy district attorney Steven market.

Speaker 6: 12:39 The defendant fired five rounds while Nicholas Bill's who was running, not toward, but away from the officers on scene. No other officer on scene, as much as unholstered a firearm to stop those from running those officers either assess the situation, call for backup and or pursued Nicholas bills on foot

Speaker 1: 12:58 And it's complaint. The district attorney cited a law that went into effect in January authored by San Diego assembly woman, Shirley Webber that allows police to use lethal force only when necessary to defend against an imminent threat of death or serious injury to officers or bystanders. Russell's bail was reduced to half a million dollars. He will be back in court on July 24th.

Speaker 5: 13:22 These charges against a white, former Sheriff's deputy for killing an unarmed white suspect come as demonstrators in San Diego and across the nation call for police reform in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis in recent weeks, the San Diego police department took action. It banned the controversial carotid restraint, neck hold. And more recently it introduced a standalone deescalation policy as well as a new requirement that police officers intervene. When a fellow officer uses excessive force, San Diego voters will weigh in on a ballot measure this fall to grate an independent panel that would investigate officer misconduct, but can these policies create the change that some in the community are looking for? And where does the movement to change policing go from here, we'll explore those questions and the special broadcast of KPBS and the national conflict resolution centers, community conversation on the future of policing in San Diego, San Diego city, council, woman, Monica, Montgomery, Khalida, Alexander founder, and president of pillars of the community, a social justice organization, and detective Jack Schafer, president of the San Diego police officers association. The union that represents officers within the San Diego police department joined the conversation led by KPBS investigative reporter, Claire Traeger, sir.

Speaker 1: 14:46 So I wanted to start with a question for all of you. There have been some recent

Speaker 7: 14:52 Attempts at reforming the San Diego police department. Um, as I mentioned for each of you say, whether those changes are enough and if not, what is another specific change you think should be made? And we can start with you council, woman.

Speaker 8: 15:08 Um, thank you for the question, Claire. Um, I know, I don't think that they are enough. I think that we are making progress. And when I say, I don't think there are enough, that's not to say that I'm, um, I am happy about the progress that we may, but we have so much time to make up for, we have to, um, exhibit a cultural change within the department within the city. And, you know, we cannot be, um, stagnant with this type of movement. So I would say, no, I acknowledge the progress, but I would say we definitely have a lot more to do.

Speaker 7: 15:45 Is there a specific thing that, that you would like to see changed going forward?

Speaker 8: 15:51 Uh, quite a few. Um, we'll be looking at, um, a surveillance ordinance on a Wednesday at the public safety livable neighborhoods committee in the fall. We're going to take up, um, uh, another, uh, ordinance that has to do with how we control, um, the stops that are heading, uh, contacts, um, how we be doing those, um, well while keeping the public safe. And so there are quite a few things, but I think overall, um, this is my work is to change policy, but also to, uh, change hearts, to change minds, to change how we interact with each other. Just generally speaking, I can put all the policies in the world, uh, on paper and we can get them passed. But if, uh, interactions do not change, it really doesn't matter if we reward the same behavior, even though those policies are there, then it won't matter. So it's, we need to do all of those things.

Speaker 7: 16:44 How about you, um, mr. Alexander, are there, have there reforms been enough and if not, what's a specific thing that you would want to change going forward?

Speaker 9: 16:53 Absolutely not. I mean, in fact, the so-called reforms, if you actually read them, don't sound much like reforms to me at all. Um, if anything, it sounds like, um, a statement saying that they're already doing things correctly. They'll continue to do things correctly. And then it's filled with a bunch of legal jargon that can be used as loopholes for, uh, almost like a blueprint for police to be able to explain why they did what they did without getting in trouble. So they said, you know, uh, reforms that they're talking about about DSG, supposedly deescalation policies, um, and, um, encouraging police to turn on one another when they do, uh, when they violate people's rights, um, you know, is, is, is, is, you know, doesn't even approach lip service for me. Um, if I was going to say that, you know, what needs to be done, I mean, first of all, there needs to be an acknowledgement that racial profiling even exists.

Speaker 9: 17:50 Like I don't think up until now, uh, the police chief, um, or, you know, some or Stephens or any of kind of law enforcement's representatives have come out publicly and acknowledge that racial profiling exists. This is despite, you know, the overwhelming feeling from the community, as well as a San Diego state university report, uh, ACL documentation, uh, tons of documentation. And so unless we can begin to have a, a shared foundation to have the conversation, I'm not sure, uh, what type of reforms they seen having. And then the last thing that I'll say is even the conversation around reforms needs to change. So for example, um, NCRC mentioned kind of their attempts to create an environment that helps navigate through cultural differences. We're not talking about cultural differences here. When we talk about racial profiling. When we talk about the abuse of everyday people walking down the street by law enforcement, that's not a cultural difference.

Speaker 9: 18:47 Um, if, if, if people in the Hoya, if people in largely white and affluent communities were treated the same way that community members in Southeast San Diego were treated treated, um, I don't think anybody would dismiss it as a cultural difference. Nobody likes being molested by police. Nobody likes being misspoken to by police. Nobody likes being disrespected by police. Nobody likes being hassled by police. So it's not a cultural conversation it's that there has to be a stop to the culture of law enforcement to take advantage of and disrespect black and Brown people in our community.

Speaker 7: 19:18 Mr. Shaffer, I don't know. Do you want to first just start by saying, if you feel like these changes have been enough, and if there are changes that you see that you want to be made or that the police officers you represent want to be made

Speaker 9: 19:33 Well, I'm, I don't think it's ever really enough. I think if we're not striving to get better, um, you know, we're, we're going to end up falling behind. So, um, I agree with what both the previous speakers, um, that we need to look at things, look at things that can actually work, um, try to implement the things that have been, um, successful in other places. Um, but you know, my, my opinion is that if we're not always trying to find a better way to do things, um, that we'll be stuck back in 1950s and we don't want to be there. You know what I mean? So, um, I feel I'm fortunate that to be a member of San Diego police department, because we have been pretty progressive and doing a lot of things, probably leading the country in a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that we're, um, by any means perfect. And we do have a lot of work to do. Um, and I think having some of these discussions, um, can lead to some of those revelations that might lead to maybe the next best way of doing things.

Speaker 7: 20:29 Is there a specific thing that you think of that, you know, you would like to see changed?

Speaker 9: 20:34 Yeah. I can't think of one thing off the top of my head, but I haven't heard a lot of really good ideas from community members and others weeks.

Speaker 7: 20:41 Councilman Montgomery, the move to defund policing is continuing to spread the country. And recently you were criticized by some community members for voting in favor of a city budget that did not include a hundred million dollar cut to police funding, but you've asked for an independent analysis of police funding. So what specifically do you think could be cut from the police budget? And do you think you could get those cuts passed by the council and the mayor?

Speaker 8: 21:08 Um, Claire, that's exactly why I asked for that deep dive into the police budget, which is something that the city has not done. Um, and so I believe in diverting, um, the Alec V allocating resources, uh, to, to further causes that really, uh, keep us that keep us safe. I do believe that a law enforcement component, um, in exactly the way that it serves now. Um, but I also believe that we do spend too much on this type of public safety. And I think there are so many other mechanisms that can keep us safe. I had a, I have a constituent that is having some issues in our neighborhood, but she doesn't want her son to be profiled. So she doesn't want to call the police. And so we have community members that can step in in situations like that that will keep everyone safe.

Speaker 8: 22:01 Um, and so those are the types of things we're looking into develop the plan for that, um, asked for the deep dive into the police department, because really, I still don't know where everything goes. And in order for me to make the decisions, the thoughtful decisions that I think my community deserves, I need to have that information on top of that. Uh, council did recently, um, when we passed the appropriations order, this, we did set aside about $29 million to be reviewed at the mid year. Um, and so that gives us an opportunity and some time, um, to, to get the information that we need so we can have an impactful, um, make an impactful decision.

Speaker 7: 22:40 Mr. Alexander, I know you and other activists have called for abolishing the police department entirely, fully, and starting over hiring new officers with new policies. So when smaller cuts to the department, um, would that satisfy you?

Speaker 9: 22:56 It wouldn't satisfy me, but it would be a nice appetizer. I mean, I'm not at all opposed to reform on the road towards abolition. Um, if you look at the amount of money that the police are getting, I think it's San Diego city alone is something close to $600 million. Um, I have no problem with taking some of that $600 million and putting it into programs that will actually, um, work towards preventing crime, as opposed to putting it into a police department whose basically sole responsibility is reacting to crime. So unless we take a more proactive approach by investing into communities, um, you know, I don't think we'll ever get to the area of abolition. And I think the more that we invest, um, in communities, the less prime we'll have and the less crime we have, the less, the majority of people will see, um, a need or a use for, uh, police officers. Mr. Schaefer, the

Speaker 7: 23:46 Analysis that we referenced at the start of this, um, that I did, uh, was a local police department records. And it showed that police when they use force on a suspect, if the suspect is a person of color, they're more likely to shoot than if the suspect is white. How would you explain this disparity?

Speaker 10: 24:06 Well, it's pretty complex, but, um, mostly, um, uses of force are not dictated usually by the officers are dictated by the person that's, that's being contacted with the subject. Um, we, we act to whatever is done in front of us. Um, and I think that, um, you know, I think they mentioned it earlier, but it's pretty rare that any force at all is used, um, especially using a firearm, um, especially, you know, when you compare it to how many contacts we have per year of people. Um, but again, you know, the officers can only react to whatever's put in front of them. Um, everybody, you know, we have the, uh, we give commands, we tell people what to do to, to not make us need to use force. Um, but sometimes they don't do that. And then we have to do what we need to do to, to effect an arrest or do whatever else we needed to do.

Speaker 7: 24:54 Council member Montgomery. Does that explanation satisfy you?

Speaker 8: 24:59 Here's what I know. I know that officers, uh, tell me, uh, that they are told to treat people that are in, uh, North of the eight different than South of the eight that's. That's what I know. And those are for people who are on the ground. And so it goes back to what I said, which is how do we interact with each other? We live in America, the, you know, law enforcement started off athletic patrol. So when, uh, mr. Alexander talks about an acknowledgement of racism, this is what we're talking about, that, you know, people of color are treated differently, even when those commands are made. Um, even when there is, um, you know, a behavior shift in the contact, you know, I am not satisfied with it. Um, Jack and I have had these conversations, I've seen it, I lived it. And I've also been told by officers that this is what goes on on the inside. So I think that, that, that definitely needs to change that everyone should be treated the same. And that's, you know, again, we have 400, 400 years to make up for, and we have, um, a foundation of our law enforcement that is rooted in that type of racism. And so we do have to talk about that, um, for sure. And there needs to be an admission of that

Speaker 7: 26:23 When you have those conversations, is it about, is it a training issue? Is it, what, what are the things that, that you're looking for, or to address that disparity?

Speaker 8: 26:36 I am looking for resolution and understand understanding the training. I'll never going to say we don't need training. Uh, but this is a, this really is a matter of the heart and the way we see each other, when we do talk about like a place like Camden, who dismantled their department and built it back up over a period of time, um, probably what they were doing when they were building it back up as assessing these types of things, these types of bias, um, uh, biases. And so we, um, we do need to do that. I don't, I don't know, it's, it's really deep. So I don't know if this training will, uh, will solve that, you know? Um, so mr. Alexander, are there things that, that you would be looking for specifically?

Speaker 9: 27:19 Well, I mean, with all due respect to Jack, I mean, just the language that he's saying to, to put the onus on the victim of police violence, that, that violence that has been perpetrated against them, um, is somehow this, their fault is again, is, is exactly why there's such a disconnect between the community itself and, and police officers, somebody with a gun, somebody with taser, somebody with pepper spray, somebody who has absolute power to do whatever they want to, to you. That's the person who needs to be held accountable, uh, for the violence, not the person who the violence is being perpetrated against. And I think it's just an example that, you know, the police aren't interested in form in reform. What they're interested in is, um, the freedom to act with impunity, to be able to do whatever they want to, to our community members and have nobody questioned it.

Speaker 9: 28:07 Um, you know, uh, the, the, the, the misnomer of police unions or the fact that you have police unions, whose job is to represent, uh, uh, police officers and, and to fight for police officers who molest people in searches, who abused people, physically who abused people, mentally, who abused people verbally, and their job is to advocate for them to stay in the police department, um, is a perfect example of, of how severe and how prop, how problematic the entire system is. And so that's when people like me and other people look at the police department, we say, look, how can we even begin to have a conversation if our humanity and our, uh, ability to say, Hey, we're being victimized here. Isn't even recognized by the people who are perpetrating that violence.

Speaker 8: 28:51 Mr. Shaffer, do you want to respond to that?

Speaker 9: 28:53 I think that, um, the issue is I, and I, and I've heard the narrative basically that the unions are bad because we're trying to protect people. Um, and I don't see it really as that. I think people like me and, and unions can, can actually be part of the solution in that we're, you know, nobody wants to get rid of, um, people that aren't doing the right thing more than people that are doing the right thing, right. As far as police officers. Um, but you know, our, our job is just to make sure that they have due process just like anybody else. It doesn't mean that we're trying to save them on the job. Um, it's very different. Um, um, the reality is very different than that. Um, I have a job to do, and, uh, but all it is is to make sure that just like any American that people would get their due process. Um, but, but that said, I, I think that when there is a problem officer, um, they need to be dealt with absolutely. But do you think about

Speaker 7: 29:42 The idea of, you know, asking police to recognize and sort of apologize for, you know, some of the racial disparities that we've seen in the past as a way to build trust with the community going forward?

Speaker 10: 29:57 I don't think I know enough about, um, that whole picture to really respond to it. Well, I'm not sure about apologizing and all that.

Speaker 1: 30:15 This is KPBS midday edition. I'm Maureen Kavanaugh with Mark Sauer, as the nation continues to grapple with how to address racial injustice and police violence. We're now going to hear the second half of a community conversation with San Diego city council member, Monica, Montgomery activist, Khalid Alexander, and San Diego police union, president Jack Schafer about the future of policing and San Diego KPBS, investigative reporter, Claire Traeger, Sarah moderated the panel. And she continues by addressing calls to reimagine the role of police officers.

Speaker 7: 30:49 Some police officers have said they didn't sign up to be social workers or mental health professionals. So are there some responsibilities that could be shifted to other city workers who may be better equipped to handle those

Speaker 10: 31:01 Gosh for at least four years? Um, but that we get a lot of stuff as police officers get a lot of stuff thrown on our laps, um, things that aren't necessarily what we're, um, best at. Um, and part of that is like, there's just been a huge, um, you know, homelessness problem, mental health problems within San Diego, um, that there are probably other people that could probably do as good or better of a job. Um, now of course, you know, they need to be safe also. So there's probably a law enforcement element to it, but it seems like whenever there's something going on in society, it always ends up giving, you know, being given to the police officers. And I think some of that should be diverted, um, you know, to, to people that might be like in social workers or clinicians and things like that for, for special issues.

Speaker 7: 31:46 What do you think could happen? And it seems like there's such a vast gap between, um, people, activists, people on the ground and the police department are there, are there things that we can do to try and repair that relationship? And yeah, I think this, this community conversation is a start, but again, it goes back to the core. This is, um, when there is not an admission that not, we're not even dealing with individual racism yet, we're not even dealing with that, but when there is not an admission of, um, a structure being a part of a racist system and perpetuating that system, then it's hard to start anywhere. Um, whenever we are trying to repair relationships, you can go from your own life one-on-one relationships. There always has to be an admission of, um, wrongdoing.

Speaker 8: 32:40 There always has to be that, and if it's not there, then we don't have anywhere to really start. So I'm gonna continue to do what I do at the city and push, push these reforms and push these conversations and get more understanding around it. Just knowing that that's the starting point right there, because everything builds off of that understanding. And if that understanding is not there, then what we build on it, as far as

Speaker 7: 33:07 Mr. Alexander pillars of the community is part of a coalition that's pushing to end pretext stops and consent searches. Can you explain what those are and why you feel like those should be banned?

Speaker 9: 33:19 Yeah, I mean, uh, Jack Shaffer might be able to give a better definition of what pretextual stops are because police are very sophisticated and using them as a reason for pulling police over people over and harassing them. My understanding is, uh, you know, uh, black people are, I think it's up to three times more likely to be pulled over by pretextual stops. So that's for example, saying, Oh, you didn't change lanes or you didn't, uh, you have, uh, a light off in the back. Um, and then in the process of that thought, what they do is they try to become more intrusive into the individual's personal life. They'll ask to search the car, they'll ask where you're going. They'll ask a number of different questions, um, which, uh, you know, the majority of times, uh, w which African Americans are less likely to actually have a crime, um, that has actually been committed from those pretextual stops.

Speaker 9: 34:10 So, yeah, I mean, one of our demands is all pretextual stops immediately in, uh, the district attorney of San Francisco. He's gone so far as to say, Hey, when we look at the numbers that show that black people are pulled over and harassed by police pretextual stops more than, than anybody else, more than white people, more than others. And then Latinos are also, uh, being, being targeted by these things. You can't look at those systems and not say that it's racist. And so because of its racist, he said that I'm not going to prosecute crime things that were found based off of a pretextual stop. Um, because unless from the top up, unless we have district attorneys that refuse to prosecute people that are based off of racist practices, um, it's going to continue to be, uh, an issue. So for us protects fuel stops mean, uh, coming up with an excuse to pull people over and harass them.

Speaker 9: 34:56 Uh, Jack was a part of a notorious. Uh, my understanding was a part of a, kind of a notorious, uh, department of the police, the gang suppression unit gang suppression unit are the ones who are most kind of subject to that things where they pull people over and then they ask them, are you a documented gang member? Are you a gang member? Do you have any tattoos? Um, so the reason for being pulled over in the first place, although you can come, it's kind of like let's make up an excuse to pull them over and then use that to be intrusive into a kind of, uh, violate them and, and, uh, uh, target them as, as, as, as minorities. And the reason they're able to get away with that is because there's no accountability. There's no accountability from the district attorney. There's no accountability from elected officials. There's no accountability from, from the

Speaker 10: 35:38 Community. So, uh, ceasing pretextual stops would be a good way to move towards and admitting that, uh, racial profiling and racism exists apologizing for the harm has done. Those are both good steps towards, uh, creating an environment where a dialogue can begin until those things happen. How can, how can we even have a conversation when Jack says he doesn't have enough information to apologize for the racist policies and practices of the police,

Speaker 7: 36:04 Mr. Shaver, do you want to, is that an accurate description of, of what those stops are or how do you want to respond to,

Speaker 10: 36:13 Um, I mean, that's the, an accurate description of the perception of some people in the public it's not accurate as far as factually, what a pretext stop is, a pretext stop would be finding probable cause. Um, somebody does something wrong in a vehicle. Um, maybe that vehicle matches the description of something like a violent crime, and you find out who's in the vehicle besides stopping them. You know, what I was working as a detective in the, in the gang unit is, um, mr. Alexander mentioned, um, you know, part of what we did was, um, we would get a violent crime and we'd have a suspect description. Um, if somebody made a stop, um, it's seems to be prudent as a police officer that you'd want to find out if that, if that car or that, or the people inside it, um, matched the description of a, of a violent crime. That's how a lot of crimes gets get to get, uh, solved. Um, you know, San Diego police department solves about 90% of our murders. You compare that to most big cities. Um, and you know, some of the big cities in America are solving about 20%, 25% of their, of their murders. Um, but that means there's a lot of people who are very violent out on the street that probably shouldn't be in the end. And, uh, you know, perhaps, you know, that probably makes a lot of, a lot of people, a lot safer.

Speaker 7: 37:29 It sounds like that's not something you'd be willing to, to stop doing.

Speaker 10: 37:34 Let's be clear because a lot of times people mix it up with, with racial profiling. Okay. It's stopping. I had, um, you know, I'm part of the cab cab commission, and I had people talking about it, like it was stopping somebody for being a race, you know, stopping somebody from being black. That's not a pretext stop that's racism. Um, if that is happening, that shouldn't be happening in that, and that needs to be taken care of, um, and handled. But, uh, but a pretext stop has very little, the only thing that race has to do with a pretext stop is a, this is a description of a, you know, of a crime.

Speaker 7: 38:06 I wanted to read a quote from the former New Jersey police chief. And he was quoted as saying within a police department, culture eats policy for breakfast. You can have a perfectly worded policy, but it's meaningless if it just exists on paper. So this is a question for all of you, and we can start with you again, uh, council member Montgomery, how do we begin to change attitudes and culture within a department, uh, specifically around use of force? So I agree with that quote, I

Speaker 8: 38:36 Think I've said it in one way or the other while we've just been in this conversation. Um, I do want to go back and say this though, in every area, in, in, uh, city politics, we, um, use the data to make our decisions and that's never questioned, but when it comes to this particular subject, the data is, is questioned. So when the data tells us that black and Brown people are more likely to be stopped, but less likely to have contraband in their white counterparts that tells us that there is racial profiling going on, and many of those stuffs were pretext stops. So, you know, we, there again, there, there's a big gap in what we are defining as racist and what is not. We know that it is a very hard to prove intent and the way policies are written allow for a lot of work arounds, um, and explanation from officers that kind of get them off the hook when it comes to these stops.

Speaker 8: 39:38 So, um, we, again, it's a, it's a culture change as a culture shift. It does have to start from the top, um, because we are so conditioned oftentimes, and we don't even realize that we are stopping someone because they're a person of color we've been conditioned to believe we should be, uh, in our education in this country or on TV or whatever it is that, uh, black people commit crimes. So if you stop at a black person more than likely they're guilty. So that's in our, you know, our minds and we have to work to, to, uh, get ourselves away from that conditioning. And so if there's, no, again, it goes back to this. If there's no admission there that we start from there. Um, and then it's really, really hard to change a culture, and that has to start from the top. And there has to be that admission from the top. Mr. Alexander, did you want to say anything about changing attitudes, changing culture, um, specific specifically around use of force?

Speaker 9: 40:38 Well, yeah, I mean the only thing that I would say, and I know it sounds like I'm beating up on Jack, but you know, um, it's not, it's not Jack Paul or anything. I mean, that's his job. His job is to defend the police no matter what. Um, and if, if, if, if that wasn't his job, then perhaps they could be the ones who were finding the bad apples in the bunch and, and removing them. But I don't expect that to happen because that's not in the job description, but if we're going to talk about stops, if we're going to talk about violence against people, if we're going to talk about kind of, how can we change that culture? I think there's really, there's two, two, two ways of doing that. One is we have to address the racism that Councilwoman Montgomery did a very good job at, uh, um, breaking down and explaining.

Speaker 9: 41:20 That's a long process. It takes a long time to get rid of the preconceived notions in our minds that black people are dangerous, that black people are criminals, um, that black people are gang members that black people deserve to pulled over because you know, more than likely they're guilty of something that's going to take a long time. Um, but the second reason why these things are able to happen is because they can get away with it. And, and that's not necessarily their fault either. Like if they've been trained to do something, if they've been trained to pull people over in a certain area, if they've been trained to pull people over who match a description, if they've been trained to do all of the things, that's not necessarily their fault. So we have to begin to look to see, well, who are the people who allow these things to happen?

Speaker 9: 42:01 Who are the people who, despite the community's cries of racial profiling, despite the statistics and the studies that say, uh, racial profiling exists, um, despite all of those things have yet to actually be able to stop in and reign in the police departments, that they, they are the ones who fund. So when, when I say that the elected officials fund police departments, that's also kind of disingenuous because it's my money. It's our tax paying money. It's the money from overtime that police are doing for policing our neighborhoods without living in our neighborhoods. It's the money, uh, that, that, that I'm paying. That's going to fund the oppression that's happening on the people that I love and that I care about. Um, and so we have to begin to talk about accountability. Um, the measures that we talked about that the police, uh, came out with recently, um, there's nothing in there about accountability.

Speaker 9: 42:51 Uh, there's nothing in there about, okay, well, when this doesn't happen, what is going, what are the consequences going to be? So there need to be consequences for bad policing. There need to be consequences for a lack of, of customer service, for lack of a better idea. If someone from Starbucks or someone from subway, uh, were to treat me the way that the police officers treat, uh, people every day in Southeast San Diego, there would be so many complaints and that person would be fired immediately. But because we have unions because we have people who, uh, fight strongly for police to be able to act with impunity, it's very difficult to hold them accountable, but that has to change that culture of not holding police accountable has to change. And so accountability, I think, is the number one thing to do in order to stop that

Speaker 1: 43:36 That was Khalid Alexander of pillars of the community. We also heard from San Diego city council member, Monica, Montgomery, and police union leader, Jack Schafer speaking as part of a community conversation project from KPBS and the national conflict resolution center KPBS invited the San Diego police department to be part of this conversation. But a department spokesman declined our invitation.

Link:

More Closures As Coronavirus Surges, San Diego Unified Goes Online For Fall, And Community Conversation: The Future Of Policing (KPBS Midday Edition)...

"ICE Out Spokane" event calls for change in the Spokane community – KHQ Right Now

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A small but passionate crowd marched through the streets of Spokane on Sunday to call for the abolition of ICE.

About 40 people gathered at the Lilac Bowl in Riverfront Park to hear speakers and march to the ICE office in downtown Spokane. They held a candlelight vigil of remembrance once they arrived. Human Rights Activists Coterie of Spokane member Chris, who declined to give his last name, said "ICE Out Spokane" is part of keeping the movement for change alive in the community.

"We're protesting the injustices. The fact that we have have kids locked up in cages and unsanitary conditions. The fact that kids under ICE custody are going missing and nobody's doing anything about it," Chris said.

He's also one of many people concerned about international students, especially if all of their classes go online because of the pandemic.

"My mother is an immigrant who actually emigrated here and stayed on an expired student visa. Growing up, I watched her go through her struggles and I know it's a tough life," Chris said. "With all these new international students, it just bothers me. It hurts me that politicians talk about keeping the best and the brightest of foreign citizens here in the United States for us, yet for something completely out of their control, they're essentially kicking them back out."

He's calling on local activists to remember who and what they stand for, along with the work that still needs to be done.

"Now as the weeks pass by, small protests get smaller and smaller. We're coming in to try and step up," Chris said. "Try and make Spokane come alive again for justice. For change."

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"ICE Out Spokane" event calls for change in the Spokane community - KHQ Right Now

If Black Lives Matter, we must abolish prisons – The New European

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Opinion

PUBLISHED: 16:40 14 July 2020 | UPDATED: 16:59 14 July 2020

Ashish Prashar

A interior view of Chelmsford Prison.Picture: PA/ Andrew Parsons

PA Archive/PA Images

We cant build a strong and supportive community for our young people of colour until we abolish the inhuman system of prison, argues Ashish Prashar

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Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only continue to grow with your support.

The impact of the Black Lives Matter movement is nowhere near close to fully surfacing. As the movement continues with protests across the world there is a wider social awakening to the issues faced by black people. This demands more from society than pulling old TV episodes from streaming platforms or black Instagram squares that are quickly relegated to the history of peoples grid. This is an intersectional movement - one that makes room for feminism, LGBTQIA equality and for other marginalised groups across the world. This means that this is not a topic that is going to be quietly dropped. If we accept that the movement will continue until we achieve radical change, then it is now time to outline what that looks like.

A key focus point must be around ending the entrapment of our citizens into unending lives of crime and deprivation, which forces both dehumanisation and stigma onto its victims. I am, of course, talking about the justice system. The prison system is supposed to balance the repayment of debt to society by an individual with enabling that person to return to society as a law-abiding citizen. The proof of the efficacy of this system must be in the pudding: in the UK, 29% reoffend within the year and data suggests that 75% of ex-inmates reoffend within nine years of release.

Prisons criminalise: from the moment an incarcerated person sets foot in one, they are stripped of their possessions, clothes and dignity. Aggressive and volatile correctional officers abuse inmates, encourage fights, over-use forceful tactics and isolate prisoners through solitary confinement, a commonly known torture method. Once out, prisoners are given virtually no support - financial, emotional or otherwise - and are sent back to the systems of deprivation that usually got them there. This time, though, they have few job prospects thanks to the stigma attached to a criminal record, they have spent time being treated as less than human and will have internalised some of that rhetoric - and their communities may now reject them as less than.

This is disproportionately an issue for black and minority ethnic people. More than half of young people in jail are of BAME background, and 26% of the overall prison population, 22,683 people, are from a minority ethnic group. The Lammy report found that black people are 53% more likely to be sent to prison for an indictable offence at the Crown Court, while Asian people are 55% more likely and other ethnic groups 81%. The Prison Reform Trust estimates the economic cost of BAME over-representation in our prison system to be 234m a year.

Instead of investing in an alternative, the government has pledged to spend 2.5bn on creating 10,000 additional prison places instead of social support and investment, when the UK already has the highest prison population in Europe. Pouring cash into four new prisons to embed even further a broken system which rarely has positive outcomes for society is a populist move designed to prove that Boris is tough on crime. Really, we should call this tough on the vulnerable but supportive of and further encouraging criminal activity.

Imagine a world without prisons: rather than pouring money into a broken system that is both ineffective and cruel, the 2.5bn committed to building four new prisons could be invested in people. If we divest resources from incarceration and work to change the justice system from the roots up, we can begin to address the inequalities rife in the system.

Police, prosecution, sentencing and jailing practices have disproportionately criminalised black and brown communities, LGBTQIA people and disabled people. For example, in the UK, drug searches make up 60% of stop and searches - not ones looking for guns and knives, despite the claim that these are for the protection of others. These drug searches often identify petty amounts - serious drug-buster missions they are not. Black people are nine times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched. The inevitable conclusion here is that police are racist and target black people, who are then taken to racist courts to be handed down sentences by racist judges.

Divesting from these existing structures to fund new community safety programmes founded on empathy is crucial. This money can then go into people; into preventative social initiatives that help to build a strong and supportive community for our young people of colour in this country. Rather than building walls like Boris counterpart in the US, he should be working out how to build up people and society at large. Only by abolishing the inhuman system of prison is this possible.

And we cant stop at the prison walls. We must reshape our society as a whole. We are not doing nearly enough to address the root causes of poverty, addiction, homelessness and mental-health crises. Criminalising poverty through harsh fines and debt regulation, criminalising addiction through drug laws, criminalising homelessness by conducting sweeps of people sleeping in parks and criminalising mental illness by turning prisons into de facto psychiatric hospitals are all treating the symptom instead of the disease. This is one of the key differences between reform and abolitionism: the former deals with pain management and the latter with the actual source of the pain.

Abolition is what we call for through Black Lives Matter - this is what must be delivered, or the system will continue to punish black and brown communities, LGBTQIA people and disabled people for the offense of their very existence.

Dominic Raab, whose views encapsulate the small-mindedness of his government as much as Boris do, may dismissively compare taking a knee to something out of Game of Thrones, but he wilfully misunderstands that change is happening. The movement, one that calls out injustices in all walks of life, will not end until we have rebuilt society into one in which vital needs like housing, education, and health care are met, allowing people to live big, beautiful, fulfilled liveswith not a prison in sight - ultimately creating better conditions and improve the lives of all its citizens.

Ashish Prashar is a justice reform campaigner who sits on the board of Exodus Transitional Community, Getting Out and Staying Out, Leap Confronting Conflict and the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice

Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only rebalance the right wing extremes of much of the UK national press with your support. If you value what we are doing, you can help us by making a contribution to the cost of our journalism.

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If Black Lives Matter, we must abolish prisons - The New European

How Prison Abolitionists Are Meeting The Moment – The Appeal

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The intersection of a pandemic and a public uprising to address police brutality has created a unique moment in historyand a distinct moment for prison abolitionists.

Two arguments now entering the mainstreamthat incarceration is an urgent public health crisis and that policing takes needed resources from communitieshave long been argued by abolitionist organizers.

Abolition is about fighting the prison industrial complex as a whole, because these violent systems are interlocking and feed off each other, explained Mohamed Shehk, national media and communications director for the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance.

Whats become clear, Shehk said, is that the prioritization of policing that led to the killing of George Floyd, and the ongoing prioritization of imprisonment in this country, are the same reasons that our healthcare systems and communities were underequipped and underfunded to address the pandemic effectively.

The greater movement is keenly aware of what Shehk called a vast opening in the political horizon. Organizers have shifted tactics with once local campaignslike No New Jails NYC, a group that led the movement last year to close Rikers Island jail complexmorphing into coalitions that are increasingly engaging the broader public.

Mon Mohapatra was a No New Jails NYC organizer and is now with Free Them All for Public Health, a coalition formed in light of COVID-19 that demands the immediate release of all people held in city jails who are over the age of 50, are jailed because of parole violations, are at high health risk, and have less than a year remaining on their sentences. Though the city has not met those demands, the number of people entering jails since mid-March declined compared to the same time last year, and the number leaving3,400 peoplewas nearly twice the number entering. The effect of this was a daily population decline of 1,480 people, according to a city report published in late May.

Participants holding a banner at a June 19 rally in Rikers Island. Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

Mohapatra said because the campaign to close Rikers had already organized a coalition, the same group was able to rapidly mobilize and expand into COVID-19 advocacy. Other local campaigns to shutter jails and prisons have similarly shifted gears in response to the pandemic.

Massachusetts nonprofit Families for Justice As Healing, founded by formerly and currently incarcerated women, shifted its prior organizing against a proposed womens prison to coordinating with 30 organizations to demand that Governor Charlie Baker release incarcerated people as COVID-19 continues to spread. JusticeLAwhich successfully fought the Los Angeles County jail expansionjoined over 40 advocacy groups on a set of demands for the county sheriff, district attorney, Superior Court, and Board of Supervisors.

The moment has not only expanded abolitionist campaigns; it has given them increased power to demand more. Mary Hooks, co-director of Southerners on New Ground, now running a campaign to end money bail and pretrial detention, said, Demands we thought that couldnt be met, could actually be met now, when we talk about freeing all of our folks and getting people out of jail. With public pressure, the Fulton County district attorneys office identified at least 300 people incarcerated in the county jail for release, though the office did not respond to The Appeals request for how many of those people were released. And when organizers got word that Fulton County Jail planned to use $23 million of federal COVID-19 relief funding to build COVID-19 isolation units, they held a rally outside the countys headquarters that attracted media attention and at least 90 protesters. The county commissioners voted against the isolation unit in early June.

Across the country, authorities have released thousands of incarcerated people from jails. (Significantly fewer have been released from federal prisons, where the number of cases continue to rise.) Abolitionists argue the current reductions are not nearly enough as cases inside prisons continue to soar. In June, demands intensified for large-scale decarceration in response to findings that upward of 300,000 people were in some form of solitary confinement in response to COVID-19.

At Californias San Quentin State Prison, a significant outbreak of the disease and prisoner hunger strike in response to poor treatment has led organizers to demand that Governor Gavin Newsom go further than releasing prisoners within 180 days of their original release date.

And budget cuts in New York City could delay the planned closure of Rikers in January 2027, The Appeal reported last month. The whole justification for building these jailsclosing Rikers, getting people out of this horrible penal colonyis now moot, Mohapatra said then.

Demonstrators march through the streets against police brutality and racism on June 20 in Atlanta. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

As decarceration demands persist, so have demands to defund police, an abolitionist tenet. George Floyds murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in May was a tipping point in the movements organizing.

With a health emergency on our hands, there was a realization that the police cant keep us safe while the government fumbled its response, Shehk noted. And much like the strengthening ties between public health and decarceration, theres growing acknowledgment of law enforcement violence as a public health issue.

Abolishing police, said Shehk, had seen less mainstream traction than the movement to abolish prisons. Theres been a more blatant and visible effort to legitimize police as people who serve the community, he added. Thats taken a whole media apparatus and propaganda machine fighting day in and day out to paint police as the good guys you call on when somethings wrong.

In less than 24 hours, Mohapatra and a small team created #8toAbolition, an abolitionist framework countering the widely shared 8 Cant Wait campaign that outlines eight police reforms aimed at reducing police violence. Quickly after the #8toAboltion frameworks launch in May, there were over 20 translations of it in the works, with some now available on the groups site.

In New York City, Free Them All for Public Health contributed to recommendations to defund the NYPD with no new jails and by closing Rikers now. The Oakland, California, chapter of Critical Resistance started an assessment of policing there, with the goal of strengthening ongoing organizing around defunding the department. Its Portland, Oregon, chapter successfully pressured lawmakers to disband the anti-gang unit of the Portland Police Bureau. The city agreed to end its policing partnership with schools and transit police, and the City Council also voted to cut $15 million for the police budget. In June, Minneapolis Public Schools terminated its contract with the police department and the City Council unanimously passed a resolution intending to disband its police department and create a new model of public safety.

Abolitionists are not just responding to a moment. Organizers, and Black organizers in particular, have long been reimagining policing and incarceration.

This work didnt come out of nowhere, organizer Mariame Kaba said in a June webinar that was co-hosted by Critical Resistance, Project NIA, Survived and Punished, Reclaim the Block, and Black Visions Collective. There are people on the ground doing this work, tilling soil, so that when the rebellion came and when the spark was literally lit, there were already some things in place that people could mobilize and organize themselves around to push, further than theyve ever been able to push before.

In Minneapolis, groups like Reclaim the Block, MPD150, and Black Visions Collective were paving the way for the political shift the city is seeing now in response to Floyds murder. Back in 2017, MPD150 released a report outlining what the city could look like without police, addressing alternatives to policing for issues like violent crime and domestic violence. (The group will release a revamped report in coming weeks.) It is one of several abolitionist blueprints suddenly made relevant: No New Jails NYC released Close Rikers NOW, We Keep Us Safe last year, while JusticeLAs successful organizing against county jail expansion pushed the county Board of Supervisors to create an Alternatives to Incarceration Work Group, which released its Care First, Jails Last report earlier this year.

Most arguments against abolition are based on the idea that police vanish and theres a wave of crime, said MPD150 organizer Ricardo Levins Morales. In this next period, the work not just of our group but many others will be to change that story in a much wider public than weve been able to reach so far.

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How Prison Abolitionists Are Meeting The Moment - The Appeal

How can nations atone for their sins? – Prospect

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Finding redemption from within: German chancellor Willy Brandt kneels in front of a war memorial in the former Jewish ghetto of Warsaw in 1970. Photo: DPApicture alliance/Alamy

What is the ideal approach for a nation confronting its historical crimes? In dealing with historical guilt, are nations better off working to become normal, or should they strive to be exceptional?

In Britain, historians attempting to critique the legacy of the empire or its role in slaveryas opposed to its abolitionhave set off furious debates, which in recent weeks have poured onto the streets. Some statues may have fallen, but there has been a backlash too, and whether or not any deep mark on the countrys sense of itself will endure is far from clear. For those hoping to inspire lasting change and sustained atonement, it is important to ask what has and hasnt worked elsewhere in the world.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which tried to account for apartheid, may have been an exceptional case and not one with universal applicability as some human rights activists would like to believe. Similarly, the German model for contending with its Nazi past has failed to be replicated, most notoriously in Russia in regard to its Stalinist history, because of the very exceptionalism inherent to it.

But is there a way out of this impasse? We will argue that the only way to make peace with a bloody history is through exceptionalismreckoning with what is exceptional in your own countrys story, and finding, too, a distinct and homegrown way to face up to the truth and its consequences. Those consequences, and their lessons, will after all be different for different peoples.

The work of Susan Neiman is instructive in this respect. Neiman is a philosopher, an American citizen, a Jewish woman, and a committed leftist who has spent the last 35 years living in Berlin trying to make sense of the moral dilemmas of her city. In her 2019 book, Learning from the Germans, Neiman invokes Tzvetan Todorovs insistence that only the Germansthe perpetratorsshould talk about the singularity of the Holocaust. By contrast, Jewsas the victimsshould be focused on its universality.

Original sins

With this moral map as her guide, Neiman returns to her native Mississippi to ask why an America that twice elected Barack Obama cant arrive at a consensus around the legacy of slavery and the continued discrimination against African Americans. Is it not time, Neiman wonders, for Americans to do what the Germans pulled off decades agoto work off their past (in German Vergangenheitsbewltigung, a key concept for her)to speak forthrightly about the countrys racial inequalities, and finally do something to compensatethe victims?

Other American progressives agree. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates gained widespread attention for his stirring 2014 article in the Atlantic demanding financial reparations for black Americans. Coates made the argument that such reparations are about slavery, but not only slavery. Centuries of racial terror and billions of dollars of economic theft from African Americans in the time since abolition also, in his view, require compensation. The power of his argument led to a hearing in the House of Representatives last June, where Coates himself testified in support of a bill to begin a study into this complex question.

Also last summer, a daring work of historical re-envisioning became the subject of public debate. The New York Times 1619 Projectnamed for the date when the first slave ship of 20 Africans from what is now Angola came to the new world, landing in Jamestown, Virginiasought to move back the starting point of American history by over a century. The horrors of slavery, rather than the liberal pieties of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were positioned at the centre of the American experience.

The gambits of both Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the progenitor of the 1619 project who was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize, are similar: to ensure that the tragic history of African Americans in the US would not be made comparable to any other. In short, it was an effort to exceptionalise the American experience: to make clear that the social, political and cultural dimensions of African American history were distinct, the scale of the prolonged crime unique. By proceeding in this fashion, US history might be made credible and convincing to those who suffered from its ravages.

In an ironic twist, their efforts echo the 19th-century description of slavery as a peculiar institution. In this earlier effort to make American history exceptional, although in this context it meant exceptionally blameless, the modifier peculiar was used to soften the travesty of slaverycontrasting it favourably with other forms of earlier human bondage. The term, coined by southern slave-owners, was meant to imply that the US was more benevolent and paternalistic in its treatment of those in bondage. Subject to criticism by American historians starting from the 1950s, the term had previously been the dominant frame by which a southern consensus on slaverys ignominious past was justified. American slavery, for these critics, was no better than any other kind. Modern activists, by contrast, think of it as much worsea shorthand for the depths to which mankind can sink.

From downfall to redemption

Neimans book came as a result of her Berlin-Mississippi intellectual journey. Part memoir, part historical inquiry, part philosophical investigation, it is a book of comparative redemption. It focuses on what has happened in German history since the Second World War, and what has failed to change in the American South since the Civil War.

Neiman is not an uncritical admirer of the German approach. In the 1950s, West Germans were silent about their participation in the crimes of the Nazi regime, and were instead absorbed by the idea that they were the real victims. Not only had they to survive among the ruins, they believed, they also had to live with the humiliation of defeat. Neiman argues that the Allies attempt to de-Nazify Germany after the war was both insincere and ineffective. For Neiman, working off the past is not something that can be imposed from without. In her eyes, German success in facing its past is rooted in the revolt of the generation of 1968that cohort compelled by history and fate to ask their parents questions about what precisely they did during the war.

Facing the past:Convicts at a hard labour camp in Siberia. Photo: GL Archive/Alamy

And ask they did. The 68 generation brought the conversation into the public sphere, demanding the terrible details. This struggle was ferocious but necessary, and enabled Germany to properly reckon with its past. The concept of Sonderweg or special path, which German historians had once deployed to describe a uniquely German trajectory from Bismarck to Hitler, can be also seen in the countrys approach towards grappling with the Nazi era. Only through its own distinct experience and approachits Sonderwegcould a workable path to a new consensual perspective be reached. Making it a crime to deny the Holocaust, as the Germans have done, could never have been legitimately and credibly imposed from outside.

Reflecting on the opportunities and risks of adopting the German approach, we have struggled with why Germanys lessons have not worked particularly well in central and eastern Europe. Most concretely, why has the wests external pressure on Russia to confront its Stalinist past in the same fashion as Germany failed so spectacularly? The answer is worth dwelling on.

Russia today

Today the majority of Russiansincluding younger Russians who we might have expected to demand answers to the thorniest historical questionsassess Stalin in a positive light. As we witness toppled statues in Europe and the US, in Russia the state has sanctioned the erection of busts of Stalin in various cities including the countrys third largest, Novosibirsk.

In 2019 the most respected pollster in Russia, the Levada Center, found that these efforts are working, with 70 per cent of Russians believing that Stalins rule had been good for the Soviet Union. In fact, the number who admired Stalin was greater than at any point since Levada started polling on the question in 2001. Lev Gudkov, the head of the Levada Centre, stated that theres been a quiet rehabilitation of Stalin on the part of the government.

The director of Moscows Gulag Museum, Roman Romanov, claims, or rather hopes, this attitude is about using Stalin as a way to fulfil something missing in peoples livesand that such admiration will fade with the older generation. But giving the rising tide of support for the dictator, this seems unlikely, and we must ask how truth and atonement went into reverse. Can it be chalked up to simple false consciousness or historical ignorance? In an age when many young Americans and British leftists, concerned with slavery and empire, are eager to learn from the German experience, what can we instead learn from Russias failure to deal with its past? Why has revisionism failed in Russia and indeed large swaths of central and eastern Europe?

First, and most obviously, while Nazi rule lasted a dozen years, Soviet rule in Russia lasted some seven decades. Nazi Germany experienced a humiliating military defeat, while the Soviets eventually won the great patriotic war during which, for all its agonies, no foreign army ever marched on Moscow. Post-war Germany was stewarded by leaders who sought a decisive break with National Socialism, whereas Khrushchev sought a break from Stalin but never really from his system, and Russia is today run by a former colonel of the secret police.

Germanys post-war economic achievements eventually allowed its citizens to face their collective guilt in a more confident, rather than a defensive spirit, with contemporary success encouraging hope that society could continue to recover and prosper into the future after drawing a line under past crimes.

The rocky and, for a time, ruinous road of the Russian economy after the Soviet collapse stands in stark contrast. Yet there is something more fundamental in Russias failed replication of the German model in the post-Cold War world. The historian Carlo Ginzburg was on to something when he suggested that the country one belongs to is not, as the usual rhetoric goes, the one you love but the one you are ashamed of. We rarely experience our national belonging as powerfully as in those moments when we feel ashamed for somebody different from us for something we are not involved in, but for someone whom we nonetheless feel a sense of responsibility.

Ones homeland is a place from which you cannot morally escape. You can emigrate, sure, but that sense of shame will always catch you up. This shame may grow out of a powerful sense of belonging, but whether it is the right material for re-building a nations political identity is another question. Is a nations courage in facing down its historical crimes an effective glue to bond a societyor, alternatively, is victimhood a better wellspring for solidarity? Might shame, victimhood and for that matter pride intermingle in confecting that complex cocktail that is national identity?

The politics of memory

Birthed out of a common trauma, the European Union is at its core a Freudian project, with all founding members of 1957 being recently defeated or occupied nations. After 1989, the approach that post-war Germany had taken in tackling its grim past became Europes assumed archetype of how eastern Europe would accomplish the same for Communism. But the eastern European countries failed to emulate it, and indeed many now fear, that with the rise of the far-right German AfD, the model itself may be in crisis at home as well. Perhaps successful atonement relies on the contingencies of time as well as place.

Central and eastern Europe returned instead into a world where competitive victimhood has the status of natural law. Nation states lost interest in the suffering they had piled on others, and insisted instead that a laser-like focus be placed on the suffering they had endured.

The Polish parliament enacted a law (later amended) in 2018 that could incarcerate any person claiming that Poles contributed to Jewish suffering during the Second World War. (The saga of the Polish-American historian Jan Gross, who in 2015 caused controversy in his native country by sayingcorrectlythat Poles had killed many more Jews than they had Germans, was undoubtedly a factor in the Polish governments whitewashing of its history). And for its part, in the most historically specious way possible, Russia began to blame Poland for starting the Second World War.

Exceptionalism is a necessary condition for effective reconciliation

The resistance to the German model of working off its past was most spectacular in Russia. During Putins second term one of us happened to be in Moscow when US historian and writer Anne Applebaum presented the Russian translation of her prize-winning book Gulag. In a smoked-filled caf not far from Lubyanka, the old KGB (now FSB) headquarters, the book launch turned out to be anti-climactic. Few showed up to celebrate with the author and the general mood was one of torpor.

In the late 1980s, in the heady days of perestroika, publication of a book like this would have been an event packed with a surfeit of political and intellectual worthies. But during Putins second term, the atmosphere had changed: the audience was now composed of mostly older people for whom events like these had become ritualised as a kind of civic duty.

Applebaums talk, in the end, was actually not about the gulag. Rather, it was about the reluctance of the Russian authorities and the majority of the Russian public to condemn Stalins crimes. When we know that Stalin killed more Russians than any foreign invader, she asked, why are so many reticent to impugn him or his regime?

Without saying so explicitly, Applebaums puzzle was to understand why post-communist Russia had become markedly different from post-war Germany. Where was the Russian counterpart to Willy Brandt falling to his knees in atonement at the Warsaw ghetto in 1970? Why was this generation of young Russians unwilling to raise the inconvenient questions that youthful Germans peppered their parents with after 1968? The audience was respectful but unmoved. None of those present could ever be suspected of being an apologist for Stalin. Yet Applebaums message fell on deaf ears.

Somehow the intellectuals had grown to think that denouncing Stalin would be acquiescing too readily in what the west was asking (demanding, really) of them. They were finished with living according to western edicts. Back in the 1990s signing on to the German approach to the politics of memory had been seen by Russians as joining a civilised club whose members all wished to credibly confront their demons. But once this wave of correctness had run its course, Russianseven former true believers in the German modelwere often looking for the restoration of the nations power, and for the restoration of its exceptionalism. Russians demanded their own Sonderweg.

Russian intellectuals have lost faith that their nation should follow the turbulent self-examination that Germans endured. Russias liberals at the book launch were still hostile to Communism, if somewhat nostalgic for the clarity and communality of the Soviet Union. Two decades after the Cold Wars end they felt like losers (more like post-Versailles than post-Second World War Germany perhaps). Of course, they were appalled by their governments efforts to normalise Stalin; certainly they looked on aghast at the polling numbers already showing Stalin valorised. But they feared that by condemning Stalin they would become complicit in the wests impulse to deprive Russia of its role defeating Hitler, and saving the world from fascism. (A similar reluctance can be seen in Britain when Churchills imperial adventures are criticised, as though this is somehow sullying his heroic role in the war.)

Overall, they tended to understand the short Soviet century as an unfinished civil war in which perpetrators became victims and victims perpetrators. This struggle will need to be resolved in Russiaatonement, after all, begins at home. It is a domestic problem and reinforces the necessity of exceptionalism.

Ultimately, what made Russia different from Germany was that, paradoxically, Germanys politics of memory was a way to resurrect German exceptionalism. Germany became an exception because it parted with the received wisdom that evil is what others do and concentrated instead on its own crimes and misdeedsa unique evil in the history of the world.

Exceptionalism is, in the analysis here, a necessary condition for effective reconciliation. It cant be imported; it should be invented. What was significant about Germany is how it was able to justify its coping with the past. When this coping is truly exceptional you can even craft, as was done in Germany, a new national identity. But this will only work if you can turn guilt into pride. If guilt ends in humiliation it wont workso the post-Soviet Russian transformation into a kind of submission was destined to backfire.

What the Russian experience instructs us is that Americas and Britains wider attempts to deal with their sorrow-filled legacies will have a chance to succeed only if it is framed as a victory of sorts. Instead of being proud of its empire, its peculiar institutions or its dictators, a country should aim to become proud of the distinctive way in which it has dealt with its distinctively troubled legacy. This cant be a way to make a country normal, but must be an opportunity to reclaim its exceptional character and set it to work for the good.

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How can nations atone for their sins? - Prospect

National media gets it wrong on Trump’s 4th of July speech – LancasterOnline

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I did not watch or listen to President Donald Trumps Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore. But I did read the reactions the next day from three national newspapers: The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. They characterized the speech as stoking a culture war and pushing racial division.

Then, I downloaded and read the full transcript of the speech, twice. It turns out these newspapers had printed gross fabrications about the presidents positively stirring, emotionally charged and factually faithful presentation of Americas history and greatness. I challenge all Americans to read and ponder the presidents remarks and, with this knowledge, evaluate the liberal national media reports (it can be read at this link: bit.ly/RushmoreSpeech).

And not just the ones in those three aforementioned newspapers. There was, in my judgment, an overwhelming misrepresentation of Trumps Mount Rushmore speech that amounts to journalistic malpractice.

And the liberal national media which includes television gets away with it, because its narrative fits the Democratic Partys narrative. And sadly, too few liberals take the time to read or listen to the original content on which that narrative is based. So, the biased narrative circulates and poisons minds and misleads the uninformed.

In his speech, Trump did refer to destructive rioting, and the damage actually and proposed to be inflicted upon statues and monuments, and the defamation of national heroes. The president was reminding us that we are still not a perfect union, but that we have the desire and fortitude to continue our work toward this goal.

Three years ago, when I was a community member of the LNP | LancasterOnline Editorial Board, this newspapers Fourth of July editorial referred to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.

While strongly recommending that Lancaster County residents visit the museum, the editorial stated: You are likely to leave the museum wanting to learn more about the years and events that followed: the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the battles for suffrage and womens equality, the civil rights movement. Vestiges of those subsequent struggles are threaded through our politics even now.

Those were issues that could not have been resolved by the American Revolutionary War. That war liberated our budding nation from Great Britain and paved the way for the creation of a republic capable of dealing with those formidable concerns.

This July, I read some news reports indicating that some Americans would not be celebrating our nations Independence Day. One hand-lettered sign called the national holiday White Mans Independence Day.

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And its true that in a July 5, 1852, speech, abolitionist Frederick Douglass referred to the immeasurable distance between white Americans and enslaved Americans on Independence Day.

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common, Douglass said, adding, What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

Trump, in his Mount Rushmore speech, rightly called slavery an evil institution, but that statement seems to have been overlooked by the national liberal media.

A Washington Post article about Trumps speech began: President Trumps unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial movement Friday at Mount Rushmore. ...

To which Holman Jenkins, in a July 7 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, replied: Except that Mr. Trump made no reference to the Confederacy or any of its symbols. His only reference to the Civil War was to Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery as fulfillment of the American Revolution.

The writers of that Washington Post article, Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, purported to offer an analysis of the presidents views, tweets and performance. They seemed more interested in getting something off their chests rather than providing an honest review of the presidents masterful speech. So much for objective journalism!

With such bias in our national liberal press, how can we look forward to creating an informed electorate prepared to cast a responsible vote for president in November? I would be happy to hear from friends and readers. I need to be encouraged. Is anything going to change? Can there be an honest interchange in our nations press?

Stuart Wesbury, a professor emeritus in Arizona State Universitys School of Health Administration and Policy, is a resident of Willow Street. He has a Ph.D. in economics and business administration. He is a former community member of the LNP Editorial Board.

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Roger Ver Shares His Story in New Video Series

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As someone who was there from virtually the start, Roger Ver has seen and done it all in Bitcoin. A tireless evangelist for Bitcoin since long before it was cool, Ver remains a vocal proponent of the benefits of peer-to-peer cash and its power to effect positive change in the world. Every day this week, Roger Ver will be sharing a chapter from his life story in a multi-part video series. Rich in anecdotes, it provides a fascinating insight into how Roger Ver and Bitcoin became inexorably intertwined. Also read: Despite Setbacks, Darknet Markets Show Continuous Growth in 2019 Roger Ver Revisits His Formative Years From preaching the gospel of Bitcoin to anyone who would listen to funding early crypto startups, Roger Vers support for the industry has known no bounds. Bitcoins first angel investor remains an outspoken advocate for Satoshi Nakamotos creation, and is perhaps best known today for his support of Bitcoin Cash. An instantly recognizable figure within the cryptocurrency space, Roger Vers entrepreneurial spirit shone through from an early age.

In the first video in the series, published on September 9, Ver explains how his fifth grade class invented its own fiat currency, named after their teacher Lindy. Lindyland dollars would be used to pay kids for work or other tasks completed. The job that earned the most Lindyland dollars was carrying the food cart from class to the cafeteria, a task which Ver took on despite it meaning he would lose five minutes of recess each day. When youre in the fifth grade, recess is the most important thing in life, but I wanted to earn those Lindyland dollars, Ver recounts. A lot of kids didnt understand the difference, that one Lindyland dollar was not worth one US dollar the actual exchange rate was 50 to 1. The Bitcoin.com Chief Executive then confesses the money-making scheme he concocted, an experience which was to instill his first lesson on inflation. Hustling in Junior High When Roger Ver moved up to junior high, his side-hustles escalated and he found himself selling candy bars to fellow students. My parents took me to Costco where you could buy candy bars for 20 cents each, Ver grins. I had $20 of my own money, that maybe I found coins in couch cushions or whatever. I spent all of it on candy bars and then sold them at school for like 50 cents each. I was able to earn, I dunno, maybe $20 or $30 a week selling candy bars in junior high school and as a junior high school kid that was a lot of money. Bitcoin.coms Executive Chairman, who served as the companys CEO for years, remains deeply involved in promoting crypto, and continues to invest in projects building new crypto protocols, applications, networks, middleware, wallets and other tools. Hes also active on the ground, getting out there to meet people at crypto conferences and global events, while striving for real world adoption of cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange and a mechanism for financial inclusion. Having manifested itself at a precocious age, Roger Vers sharp eye for a deal led to him launching his first online venture in 1999 through 2000. At the peak of the dot com crash, Ver was looking for a new hard drive for his PC and discovered that in the clearance sales they were selling 9GB hard drives for around $100. Checking on Ebay he found that the same drives would fetch almost $400 online. I am going to use every last penny I have to buy these hard drives, he recalls. So I had $1,400 of my own money. I bought 14 of those hard drives, I kept one for me and sold the other 13 on Ebay. He continues: So I went and took the $4,000 that I made in profit plus the $1,400 I had before, so I had around $5,000 and I went and bought $5,000 of additional computer parts and I sold those pretty quickly I thought, wait a minute, I can make $5,000 a week just selling computer parts on eBay? Im done with college. In subsequent episodes of Roger Vers video retrospective, the bitcoin entrepreneur picks up where he left off, in a frank interview that reveals how: He sold Magic the Gathering cards and Beanie Babies on the internet in high school. He went to prison for selling firecrackers online. He sold his Lamborghini to buy more bitcoin. At the end of the first episode, Ver sums up his business philosophy succinctly: All any business is, is moving something from where it is worth less to where it is worth more The value is in the mind of the beholder.

What are your thoughts on Roger Vers business story? Let us know in the comments section below. Images courtesy of Shutterstock. Did you know you can verify any unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction with our Bitcoin Block Explorer tool ? Simply complete a Bitcoin address search to view it on the blockchain. Plus, visit our Bitcoin Charts to see whats happening in the industry. The post Roger Ver Shares His Story in New Video Series appeared first on Bitcoin News .

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Roger Ver Shares His Story in New Video Series

Check Out These Amazing Images Of Comet Neowise Taken From Around The World – Forbes

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Comet Neowise seen behind an Orthodox church over the Turets, Belarus on Tuesday, July 14, 2020 ... [+] (photo by Sergei Grits).

Every once in a while we are treated to a fantastic occurrence on Earth, when a comet springs into view in our night sky. And right now, theres a particularly awesome comet putting on a show Comet Neowise.

Since early July the comet has been visible in the northern hemisphere about an hour after sunset and before sunrise. While best views of the comet are seen through binoculars or a telescope, it is now bright enough to be seen with the naked eye too.

As a result weve been seeing plenty of fascinating photos of the comet from around the world, with its bright head (or nucleus) and tail of dust and gas clearly visible streaming behind it. Many are calling this one of the greatest comets of the 21st Century, and its not done yet.

Comet shining above Gran Sasso d'Italia pick (Corno Grande), in L'Aquila, Italy, on July 7, 2020. ... [+] (Photo by Lorenzo Di Cola)

HARBIN, CHINA - JULY 9, 2020 - Comet neowise (C / 2020 F3) was observed. Harbin City, Heilongjiang ... [+] Province, China, July 9, 2020.

In this image released by NASA, Comet Neowise, left, is seen in the eastern horizon above Earth in ... [+] this image taken from the International Space Station on Sunday, July 5, 2020.

Comet Neowise seen before sunrise behind the castle Neuschwanstein on July 14 2020 in Bavaria, ... [+] Schwangau (photoby Karl-Josef Hildenbrand).

Comets become visible when they approach our Sun on their long orbits. As they get closer they are heated up, releasing some of their trapped ices and material into space, and forming long tails that can extend for millions of even billions of kilometers.

Comet Neowise, discovered in March 2020, takes several thousand years to orbit the Sun. It was discovered as it was making its way into the Solar System, making its closest approach to the Sun on July 3.

It is now on its way out, and will make its closest approach to Earth on July 23 at a distance of 104 million kilometers not returning for about 6,800 years.

Comet Neowise seen above Salgotarjan, Hungary, early Friday, July 10, 2020 (photo byPeter Komka).

Comet Neowise or C/2020 F3 is seen before sunrise over Balatonmariafurdo, Hungary, Tuesday, July 14, ... [+] 2020 (photo by Gyorgy Varga).

C/2020 F3 (Neowise) comet shining above Santa Maria della Piet Church in Rocca Calascio, L'Aquila, ... [+] Italy, on July 11, 2020 (photo by Lorenzo Di Cola).

Comet Neowise seen above the mountain of Montserrat, near Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, on July 9, ... [+] 2020 (photo by Albert Llop).

As a result, the comet is likely to get brighter in our skies and more visible over the next few days. While it is now too low on the horizon to see in the morning for most, by July 19 it will be up to 20 degrees above the northwest Horizon about 80 minutes after sunset, prime time for viewing.

People often refer to extremely bright comets as comets of the century. The last one to be unequivocally classed as such was Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997, one of the brightest comets seen in our skies for decades.

Comet Neowise passes St Mary's Lighthouse in Whitley Bay in the early hours of Tuesday morning ... [+] (photo by Owen Humphreys).

Comet NEOWISE seen in the night sky over Ryazan in Russia.

Comet Neowise is visible in the night sky above Saltburn pier on July 13, 2020 in Saltburn By The ... [+] Sea, England (photo by Ian Forsyth).

Comet Neowise (C/2020 F3) shining at sunset above the Port of Molfetta in Molfetta on July 11, 2020 ... [+] (photo by Davide Pischettola).

Since then weve had a number of false dawns, as comets approached the Sun and looked like they might be quite bright before breaking apart. We have had a few bright visitors though, such as Comet McNaught in 2007.

While Comet Neowise probably isnt bright enough to declare it a Great Comet just yet, it is still a sight to behold in the sky. So if you get a chance these next few days, make sure you head outside and see if you can grab a glimpse of our cosmic visitor.

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Check Out These Amazing Images Of Comet Neowise Taken From Around The World - Forbes

Rare comet NEOWISE and aurora lights captured in Okanagan – Salmon Arm Observer

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The image was captured over Big Horn Lake near Kelowna with a Pixel 4XL android phone

A local astrophotographer captured a rare sight only some would be lucky enough to see.

Comet NEOWISE lit up the Northern Hemisphere accompanied by mystifying Aurora Borealis lights on July 14, close to Big Horn Lake near Kelowna. The image of the comet was uploaded to a space enthusiast Twitter account, allowing everyone to bask in its unworldly beauty.

READ MORE: Super blood wolf moon fills Okanagan skies, to photographers delight

The bright comet NEOWISE, officially known as C/2020 F3, wont pass Earth again for another 6,800 years according to the International Dark-Sky Association.

Astronomers are predicting that if NEOWISE continues to hold together, it will be visible in the morning sky until approximately July 16. Scientific research explains that comets are known to be unpredictable and will easily fall apart due to the warmth within the earths atmosphere, so keep your eye out, you still may catch a glimpse.

READ MORE: Can you hear anything in space?

Aviation and space

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Rare comet NEOWISE and aurora lights captured in Okanagan - Salmon Arm Observer

In the hunt for ALS treatments, researchers find promise in silencing genes – BioPharma Dive

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For 25 years, researchers have explored an idea that, by regulating certain genes, they could treat one of the world's most debilitating neurological diseases. That work has led to encouraging data, with the latest coming Wednesday from two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"It's a really exciting time for the field," said Orla Hardiman, clinical professor of neurology at Trinity College in Dublin and co-author to a NEJM editorial published alongside the studies.

Previously, scientists discovered the risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, is higher if a select group of genes mutate. The newly published studies each tested an experimental drug meant to silence one such gene, called SOD1, that encodes an eponymous protein. While both studies were designed to evaluate safety, researchers also looked at protein levels to see if the drugs were working as intended.

One of these drugs uses a virus to deliver a small strip of genetic material into patients' spinal areas. In theory, the material would block the gene from making its protein, but results from two patients showed that neither had a substantial change in protein levels in their cerebrospinal fluid.

However, after one of the patients died, an autopsy showed SOD1 protein levels in his spinal cord tissue were lower than in untreated patients with the same form of ALS. The study investigators concluded that additional trials with a larger number of patients are necessary to better understand the drug's effects.

The other study had more clearly positive results. It tested four doses of Biogen's tofersen against placebo, and found lower SOD1 protein levels in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients who received the drug. Compared to those in the placebo group, protein concentrations were about 20 to 25 percentage points lower for patients given the two middle tofersen doses and 33 percentage points lower for patients on the highest, 100 mg dose.

Biogen, which announced summary data from the trial last year, has since moved the high dose into a larger, efficacy-focused trial that aims to recruit around 100 patients. Enrollment has been "reasonable," albeit with slight delays due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to Toby Ferguson, head of the company's neuromuscular development unit.

Though tofersen will likely need positive late-stage results to support an approval, the currently available data offer a confidence boost for Biogen. Like other ALS drug hunters, the biotech has hit setbacks the most damaging of which came in 2013 when its small molecule medicine dexpramipexole failed a Phase 3 study.

"It's not fully shown to work yet, but at least the biology seems to be going in the right way," Ferguson said of tofersen. "It fundamentally says to me that if we pick the right targets, ALS can be a treatable disease. And we need to push forward both with genetic targets and appropriate targets for the broader population."

The tofersen study may also fuel optimism in the broader ALS research community. While two drugs are approved for ALS, there remains an urgent demand for more treatments. Most patients live just three to five years after they're diagnosed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Following decades of research, genetic medicine has, in recent years, proven itself to be a valuable weapon against hard-to-treat neurological conditions. In 2016, for example, Biogen's drug Spinraza became the first ever approved treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, a rare and often life-threatening condition that impairs muscle growth. Spinraza, like tofersen, is a type of gene-silencing medicine called antisense oligonucleotides, or ASOs.

Sarepta Therapeutics also has two ASO products approved for a different muscular disorder, and research on other gene-based treatments is advancing for difficult neurological diseases like Huntington's and Rett syndrome.

In ALS, several companies are working on genetic medicines. Novartis and Voyager Therapeutics each have plans for a SOD1-targeting ALS gene therapy, while MeiraGTx and the partners Pfizer and Sangamo Therapeutics are developing gene therapies not specific to SOD1.

With tofersen, though, Biogen holds a leading and potentially tone-setting position.

As the drug progresses through late-stage testing, Hardiman said it would be "fantastic" if the drug demonstrates not just reductions in SOD1 protein levels, but also the ability to slow or stabilize the disease. Biogen's smaller study hinted that tofersen's effect on SOD1 protein levels might translate to slower functional declines, but the data aren't proof it actually does.

"If we can show that gene-silencing in SOD1 is effective, it opens the way for other gene-silencing approaches in other genetic forms of ALS," she said, pointing to several other mutations associated with ALS.

"We are in a new era now where we have a much better understanding of genomic regulation, and we're getting to a place where it's really possible to modulate these pathways in a way that's genuinely therapeutic," Hardiman added.

ALS drug research also extends beyond genes, since estimates hold that only 5% to 10% of cases are inherited and, within that fraction, SOD1 mutations account for 15% to 20% of cases.

Currently, the Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS Research is running a first-of-its-kind platform trial to test five experimental therapies, including ones from Biohaven Pharmaceutical and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Ra Pharmaceuticals, now owned by Belgium's UCB.

Privately held Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, meanwhile, is working separately with the Healey Center. The company said in December its experimental treatment slowed ALS progression in a mid-stage study, although no actual data was released.

Alexion Pharmaceuticals, a large rare disease drugmaker, also recently began exploring whether one of its approved therapies could work in ALS too.

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In the hunt for ALS treatments, researchers find promise in silencing genes - BioPharma Dive

Researchers Discover Genetic Variants Linked to Type 2 Diabetes – HealthITAnalytics.com

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July 08, 2020 -In the largest study of its kind, researchers discovered hundreds of novel genetic variants linked to type 2 diabetes, potentially improving care for millions living with this disease.

A team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Veterans Health Administrations (VHA) Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Veterans Affairs Medical Center (CMCVAMC) examined the genes of more than 200,000 people around the world with type 2 diabetes.

In addition to uncovering new genetic variants linked to the condition, researchers identified gene variants that vary by ethnicity, as well as variants tied to conditions related to type 2 diabetes like coronary heart disease and chronic kidney disease.

The group used data from the worlds largest biobank, the Million Veteran Program (MVP) in the VHA, as well as data from the DIAGRAM Consortium, the UK Biobank, the Penn Medicine Biobank, and Biobank Japan. Researchers analyzed a study population of 1.4 million people around the world, of whom almost 230,000 had type 2 diabetes.

The team then broke down the genetic makeup of those hundreds of thousands with type 2 diabetes and found 558 independent genetic variants that are differentially distributed between people with and without type 2 diabetes. Twenty-one of these variants were specific to European ancestry while seven were specific to African American ancestry. Of the 558 variants found, 286 had never been discovered.

Researchers set out to discover if certain genetic variants among this group of people could be linked to specific type 2 diabetes-related conditions.

Ultimately, three were linked to coronary heart disease, two to acute ischemic stroke, four to retinopathy, two to chronic kidney disease, and one to neuropathy, saidMarijana Vujkovic, PhD, a biostatistician at both the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, VHAs CMCVAMC and a co-leader for the VHAs national MVP Cardiometabolic Working Group.

Building on this research, the scientific community can assess which of the surrounding genes nearby the identified genetic variants is likely to be the causal gene that alters the risk of type-2 diabetes, and that could lead to early interventions to limit controllable risks of developing the condition.

While the researchers found many genetic variants in people with type 2 diabetes, no one variant was labeled as the worst or most dangerous.

However, just like heart disease, schizophrenia, or obesity, it is the accumulation of a large number of these variants that can add up to a considerable increase in risk, said co-senior authorBenjamin F. Voight, PhD, an associate professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at Penn, and a co-leader for the VHAs national MVP Cardiometabolic Working Group.

We hope this study can not only help find that subset of patients with substantial risk, but also to motivate new, future studies for treatments based on these findings.

Knowing more about the genetic variants linked to type 2 diabetes could help identify potential therapeutic targets for type 2 diabetes. Researchers also noted that this information could help guide treatment plans for people with the disease who may be susceptible to specific diabetes complications.

Going forward, the researchers plan to conduct a long-term examination of how genetics influence disease progression among patients with type 2 diabetes and associated metabolic disorders. The group is also leveraging the list of newly-discovered genes to investigate medication interactions.

Knowing the genetic susceptibility for diabetes complications in a patient already diagnosed with type-2 diabetes, for example through a cumulative genetic risk score, could help guide that patients care, said co-senior-authorKyong-Mi Chang, MD, a professor of Medicine at Penn, Associate Chief of Staff for Research at VHAs CMCVAMC and the Co-PI for the VHAs MVP Merit Award that supported this work.

As clinicians, we hope that these findings can ultimately be applied to improve the health outcomes for our patients including veterans.

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Researchers Discover Genetic Variants Linked to Type 2 Diabetes - HealthITAnalytics.com

ACMG’s Genetics in Medicine Journal Receives Impact Factor of 8.904 for 2019–Journal is Ranked 13th of 177 Journals in Genetics & Heredity -…

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BETHESDA, Md., July 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) announced today that the 2019 Journal Impact Factors, published by Clarivate Analytics in the latest edition of Journal Citation Reports, calculated an impact factor of 8.904 for ACMG's official journal, Genetics in Medicine (GIM). This is the second highest Impact Factor in the journal's history and ranks GIM 13th of 177 titles in the Genetics & Heredity category.

The Impact Factor is an objective measure of the world's leading journals, based on articles' cited references and is oft considered a measure of a journal's impact, overall successful performance and relevance to its field. The most highly cited article in GIM in 2019 was "Recommendations for Reporting of Secondary Findings in Clinical Exome and Genome Sequencing, 2016 Update (ACMG SF v2.0): A Policy Statement of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics."

"GIM's editors and editorial staff are delighted that our Impact Factor has increased from last year. This improvement in the Impact Factor once again demonstrates that the journal remains one of the most widely read and cited journals publishing clinically relevant research in the life sciences," said GIM's Editor-in-Chief Robert D. Steiner, MD, FAAP, FACMG."We are most thankful to the peer reviewers who put in countless hours to help maintain the outstanding quality of articles and the authors who trust us to disseminate their groundbreaking scholarly work. The Impact Factor is one of a number of metrics used to evaluate journals, and a journal should not be evaluated solely on that one metric. Genetics in Medicine'scontinued success and relevance is also reflected in our very high overall downloads and reads as well as a prominent social media presence."

ACMG CEO Maximilian Muenke, MD, FACMG said, "As the CEO of the ACMG, I am extremely proud of 'our' journal. As a physician-scientist who before joining ACMG worked in academic settings where publishing in high-impact factor journals was the goal, I am well aware of the importance of this metric. My congratulations and gratitude on increasing GIM's impact factor go to Bob Steiner, Jan Higgins, the GIM staff and the entire editorial team to make this success happen!"

Genetics in Medicineis published by Springer Nature. The journal, published since 1998, is supported by an expert board of editors representing all facets of genetic and genomic medicine, including biochemical and molecular genetics, cytogenetics, and the application of genetics and genomics to other medical specialties such as oncology, cardiology, neurology, pediatrics, ophthalmology and maternal-fetal medicine.

About the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) and ACMG Foundation

Founded in 1991, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) is the only nationally recognized medical professional organization solely dedicated to improving health through the practice of medical genetics and genomics, and the only medical specialty society in the US that represents the full spectrum of medical genetics disciplines in a single organization. The ACMG is the largest membership organization specifically for medical geneticists, providing education, resources and a voice for more than 2,300 clinical and laboratory geneticists, genetic counselors and other healthcare professionals, nearly 80% of whom are board certified in the medical genetics specialties. ACMG's mission is to improve health through the clinical and laboratory practice of medical genetics as well as through advocacy, education and clinical research, and to guide the safe and effective integration of genetics and genomics into all of medicine and healthcare, resulting in improved personal and public health. Four overarching strategies guide ACMG's work: 1) to reinforce and expand ACMG's position as the leader and prominent authority in the field of medical genetics and genomics, including clinical research, while educating the medical community on the significant role that genetics and genomics will continue to play in understanding, preventing, treating and curing disease; 2) to secure and expand the professional workforce for medical genetics and genomics; 3) to advocate for the specialty; and 4) to provide best-in-class education to members and nonmembers. Genetics in Medicine, published monthly, is the official ACMG journal. ACMG's website (www.acmg.net) offers resources including policy statements, practice guidelines, educational programs and a 'Find a Genetic Service' tool. The educational and public health programs of the ACMG are dependent upon charitable gifts from corporations, foundations and individuals through the ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine.

Kathy Moran, MBAkmoran@acmg.net

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ACMG's Genetics in Medicine Journal Receives Impact Factor of 8.904 for 2019--Journal is Ranked 13th of 177 Journals in Genetics & Heredity -...

Lupus Research Alliance Announces Nine Recipients of New Award in Partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb – BioSpace

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NEW YORK, July 14,2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Alliance For Lupus Research(LRA) is pleased to announce the first recipients of the inaugural LRA-BMS Accelerator Award*, a collaborative project with sponsoring partner Bristol-Myers Squibb. The Award provides a collective total of $3,000,000 to support nine cutting-edge lupus research projects over two years that focus on understanding the underlying causes of systemic and cutaneous lupus, unraveling its complexity, and identifying novel biomarkers.

Nine recipients were selected from a large volume of promising applications from throughout the country and abroad. Several researchers are working to understand how the immune system overreacts, while three are testing new markers in the blood and urine that may be used to better diagnose and monitor the disease. Other projects focus on identifying the genetic causes of lupus, and one is looking at how to improve the evaluation of clinical trial results.

LRA Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Teodora Staeva commented, "The Lupus Research Alliance is delighted to be partnering with pharmaceutical leader Bristol Myers Squibb to support critical fundamental research that could lead to much-needed new therapies, biomarkers, patient-stratification approaches and outcome measures for lupus."

Peter Schafer, Executive Director, Translational Medicine at BMS, commented, "We're excited to work with the Lupus Research Alliance on this initiative, as there's a significant unmet need for people living with lupus. We believe the LRA-BMS Accelerator Award will advance critical research that will help us better understand this devastating disease."

LRA-BMS Award Recipients

Characterizing the Immune Response to Lupus

Joel Guthridge, PhD, Oklahoma Medical Research FoundationPredicting treatment responses in patients with systemic lupusDr. Guthridge's study will use emerging technology to understand the immune response of patients who respond positively to treatment with abatacept. Results of this study may help predict which patients are most likely to benefit from different lupus treatments.

Victoria Werth, MD, University of PennsylvaniaPredicting treatment responses in patients with cutaneous lupusDr. Werth's study will identify key immune cells that correlate with successful treatment, which will allow clinicians to predict which patients are likely to respond to the lupus drug hydroxychloroquine and other antimalarials before starting treatment.

J. Michelle Kahlenberg, MD, PhD, University of MichiganComparing the immune response in patients with systemic and cutaneous lupusDr. Kahlenberg's research will measure the immune response in the blood and skin samples from people with either systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) or cutaneous lupus erythematosus (CLE) to better understand what causes each and how best to diagnose and treat each type.

Evaluating Lupus Biomarkers

Ilana Brito, PhD, Cornell UniversityLinking gut bacteria to lupusDr. Brito's research is looking at the specific effects of bacteria in the gut on the immune system of lupus patients. This research will help identify new markers of lupus that could serve as targets for treatment and possibly diagnosis.

Chandra Mohan, MD, PhD, University of HoustonMonitoring lupus nephritis in a less invasive wayDr. Mohan's research has identified and will test the effectiveness of markers in the urine of lupus patients to diagnose lupus nephritis and monitor its treatment. This approach may reduce the need for invasive surgical kidney biopsies.

Searching for the Genetic Causes of Lupus

Marta Alarcn-Riquelme, MD, PhD, Fundacin Pblica Andaluza Progreso y SaludDetermining the genetic basis of the lupus immune responseDr. Alarcon-Riquelme is looking to find the specific genes associated with differences in how the immune system functions that distinguish groups of lupus patients. Her results may help determine optimal therapies for each group of patients.

Patrick Gaffney, MD, Oklahoma Medical Research FoundationFinding race-specific predictors of lupus Dr. Gaffney's study aims to uncover how race and ethnicity are linked to differences in the type of organ damage caused by lupus and toidentify new treatment targets.

Vivian K Kawai, MD, Vanderbilt University Medical CenterIdentifying genes controlling lupus and its severityDr. Kawai is using a novel approach of combining data from different sources to determine the genetic risk factors for developing severe lupus.

Improving Clinical Trials

Kenneth C Kalunian, MD, University of California, San DiegoChoosing better endpoints for clinical trialsDr. Kalunian will develop a comprehensive tool for researchers to best understand and evaluate the effectiveness of potential therapies in clinical trials.

About the LRA-BMS Accelerator Award

The LRA-BMS Accelerator Award was created to fund cutting-edge research projects that focus on understanding the underlying mechanisms of disease, addressing lupus heterogeneity, and identifying novel biomarkers. The initiative aims to stimulate lupus research innovation, accelerate investigation on human lupus rather than relevant model organisms, and realize synergies between academia and industry. A collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb, the Award provides $300,000 to each awardee over two years. Close oversight is provided by a Joint Steering Committee with equal representation from LRA and BMS. The company will have first right to negotiate with the principal investigators' institutions for any intellectual property arising from the projects.

About Lupus

Lupus is a chronic, complex autoimmune disease that affects millions of people worldwide. More than 90 percent of people with lupus are women; lupus most often strikes during the childbearing years of 15-45. African Americans, Latinx, Asians and Native Americans are two to three times at greater risk than Caucasians. In lupus, the immune system, which is designed to protect against infection, creates antibodies that can attack any part of the body including the kidneys, brain, heart, lungs, blood, skin, and joints.

About Lupus Research Alliance

TheLupus Research Allianceaims to transform treatment while advancing toward a cure by funding the most innovative lupus research in the world. The organization's stringent peer review grant process fosters diverse scientific talent who are driving discovery toward better diagnostics, improved treatments and ultimately a cure for lupus.Because the Lupus Research Alliance's Board of Directors fund all administrative and fundraising costs, 100 percent of all donations goes to support lupus research programs.

*Formerly the LRA-Celgene Accelerator Award.

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