In November, Arizona voters will decide on Proposition 312, a ballot measure that would allow property owners to claim a tax refund for costs they’ve incurred to address people illegally camping, using drugs, or defecating in public.

The measure was put forth by critics of the homelessness policies of many Arizona cities, and can be understood by looking at two legal standoffs over unhoused camping in public spaces. One was a massive encampment in Phoenix called “The Zone,” which, at its peak, was home to over 1,000 unhoused people. The other: a mostly dry riverbed in Tucson called Navajo Wash. 

Over the past few years, dozens of unhoused people have taken up camp in a city-owned section of Navajo Wash, which was once dotted with palo verde and mesquite trees that provided some relief from the scorching desert sun. But some neighbors cut many of them down, without the city’s approval, leaving behind over 50 twisted stumps scattered across the patch of land. Those same neighbors later sued the city, demanding the camps be forcibly dismantled. The neighbors claimed they were “negatively impacted by the masses of garbage and human waste.” 

Tucson does not have a policy of clearing every homeless encampment following complaints. Instead, camps that don’t pose public safety risks are allowed to stay. The city helps remove trash, offers services and monitors the encampment. Law enforcement is only called to encampments when there are reports of violent or criminal activity, which are then swept away.

In court, Tucson’s lawyers insisted the city’s handling of Navajo Wash was adequate. City workers had handed out basic supplies like backpacks, tarps, food and water. They cleaned up trash at the site and referred people to services steering them toward a shelter or permanent living situation. The court agreed, ruling that the city adequately abated the “nuisance” without forcibly clearing people away. 

Tucson’s strategy of dealing with homelessness by getting people into permanent housing while offering voluntary services follows a widely-used model called Housing First. This model avoids requiring people to complete programs or meet other preconditions to get housing resources. Its advocates cite research showing this approach increases the likelihood of people remaining in stable housing, accessing medical care and receiving substance abuse treatment. 

However, a growing conservative backlash is taking aim at this philosophy, both by removing encampments like the one at Navajo Wash and opposing the underlying policies they blame for allowing the camps to exist. Instead, they’re pushing cities to use the criminal justice system to bear down on homelessness, despite resistance from police and prosecutors who say the problem can’t be arrested away. They want cities to use criminal enforcement as a way to apply pressure to get unhoused people into treatment and off the streets. 

Republican legislators put Proposition 312 on the ballot. The measure would allow property owners to claim a tax refund for costs they’ve incurred when cities maintain a “public nuisance” or show a pattern of not enforcing laws frequently invoked against unhoused people, like loitering or obstructing public thoroughfares. The legislation does not define what reasonable expenses could include, but proponents of the measure cite private security, surveillance systems and cleanups. No Democrats in the state legislature supported the measure, which cannot be vetoed if approved by voters.

By allowing penalties for governments who use Housing First strategies, Proposition 312 advances this ongoing, nationwide effort to dial up law enforcement as a response to homelessness. But critics worry the shift will strain resources and punish a population that needs support, ultimately proving counterproductive to getting people off the streets and into stable housing. 

Legal precedent has long held that it is not a crime to be homeless—though many cities had laws like bans on sleeping in public which were difficult or impossible to follow when unhoused. Until recently, a federal appellate court ruling provided legal guardrails, saying that, “as long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”

But this summer, in its ruling on City Of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those protections, clearing the way for policies and court battles pushing the country toward a more punitive handling of homeless encampments. 

In the ruling’s wake, state and local leaders nationwide have proved eager to ramp up tactics. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, for example, issued an executive order, within a month of the ruling, authorizing sweeps on state-owned land. And in recent months, cities from Spokane, Washington, to Des Moines, Iowa, have added or expanded their own camping bans or resumed enforcement of existing ones.

The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based think tank, submitted a legal brief in Grants Pass arguing that Housing First fails because many individuals do not want housing, “at least, not at the cost of giving up their addictions or other poor lifestyle choices.” The organization suggested cities could arrest and incarcerate unhoused people to compel them to treat underlying issues. 

“Allowing people to live on the streets or in tents in a park is not a compassionate response to the problem,” Goldwater’s filing reads. “A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need — including taking them into custody against their will if they are incapable of managing themselves.” 

Before it interceded in the Supreme Court case, the Goldwater Institute supported plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to clear The Zone, the large Phoenix encampment that sat between a cluster of county buildings and the state capital complex. Then it brought legislation to Republican Arizona State Senate President Warren Petersen, who helped it through the legislature, and onto the state’s November ballot as Proposition 312.

Representatives from the Goldwater Institute declined to comment, but supporters of Proposition 312 say the goal is to compensate property owners who have spent money due to their city’s inadequate response to homelessness and prevent the development of more large-scale encampments like The Zone. 

“Prop 312 gives us hope that not only will the City of Phoenix not allow another ‘Zone’ to happen, but if so, there would be some compensation for small businesses like ours,” Debbie and Joe Faillace, former owners of a sandwich shop next to the encampment and plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the city, wrote in support of the measure.

Proposition 312 does not clearly define what kinds of remedies are adequate to keep cities off the hook. According to Sheriff Chris Nanos in Pima County (Tucson), law enforcement responds to practically all nuisance complaints — but not always to the liking of residents and neighboring businesses. 

“The law does not say you must take them to the county jail every time. Once you call us, it is our choice. We look at it and consider, do we need to take them to jail for urinating on the side of a building, or do we need to give them a ticket, or do we just tell them to get out of here?” Nanos said. “I think they really want to force the hand of government to do what they want. But you cannot arrest away homelessness.”

The sheriffs who run the state’s largest jail systems, including Pima and Maricopa Counties, have overseen facilities marred by overcrowding, poor conditions a streak of deaths. Jails are already straining to provide mental health and addiction resources for detainees, whose needs outpace the availability of services, Nanos said.

Josh Jacobsen, a business owner and co-chair of the Tucson Crime Free Coalition, a group backing Proposition 312, insisted that the goal isn’t frequent sweeps, which, Jacobsen says, are harmful to the unhoused and do nothing to curb homelessness. Instead, he thinks the city should make arrests, so the criminal justice system can forcefully guide people toward services. 

“With the right amount of pressure, something can be done about it,” Jacobsen said. “The goal is that with the right touch, you can get people to take advantage of services.” 

The county runs several diversion programs, including a specialty court for addressing homelessness, which allow minor charges to be dropped after meeting certain conditions, such as completing an addiction recovery program, though prosecutors warn those programs have limited space. 

In most cases, there is little police can do to meaningfully address nuisance complaints tied to homelessness, said Joe Clure, a retired officer and executive director of the Arizona Police Association, a professional group representing police labor organizations in the state. 

“You do have to manage your human police resources to be most advantageous to community safety. Whether or not that is aggressively going after homeless nuisance violations — that probably would be better left to somebody else than police,” Clure said. “When there is a potential loss of revenue, governments take that very seriously. It probably would move those types of violations up on the priority list. … We will have to be more enforcement-minded.”

“I think they know that mental illness does not cause homelessness,” said Will Knight, decriminalization director at the National Homelessness Law Center. He points instead to issues like stagnating wages, high housing costs and low housing vacancy rates. “But it’s a real easy myth to sell because of what’s the most visible parts of homelessness to most people in the community, who also themselves feel uncomfortable seeing it.” 

For decades, The Zone has been home to unsheltered people, but in recent years, a growing number slept on streets and sidewalks, in tents and other shelters cobbled together from palettes and tarps. Critics of Phoenix’s handling of The Zone accused the city of not enforcing laws against camping, obstructing thoroughfares and using illegal drugs—the same kinds of offenses whose non-enforcement would allow rebates under Proposition 312. 

Last fall, officials cleared The Zone from downtown after business and property owners, represented by the same law firm that led litigation to clear Navajo Wash, sued the city over lost business, employees and property value. Precisely how that clearing was dismantled was shaped by two major forces—one from inside the city’s bureaucracy and one from Washington, D.C.

In 2021, the Justice Department announced an investigation into the Phoenix Police Department, not just for use of force and discriminatory policing, but, for the first time for any department, also how police handled unhoused people’s belongings. The investigation, released earlier this year, found city officials seized and destroyed unhoused people’s property without adequate notice or recourse. Police, who previously played a major role in encampment sweeps and cleanings, also regularly stopped, detained and arrested unhoused people—even when there wasn’t evidence of any crime.

While the investigation was underway, Phoenix created a new Office of Homeless Solutions in 2022. It expanded shelter capacity and developed a protocol for storing unattended property. This new office oversaw The Zone’s clearing.

The office cleared the encampment block-by-block, giving advance notice and connecting people with shelter, Rachel Milne, the city’s Homeless Solutions Director told Phoenix City Council in September. The city worked in a “humane and compassionate manner, offering everyone an indoor alternative place,” Milne said.

“In many circumstances, we are really reevaluating what public safety means,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said at a September city council meeting. Many calls for service that had gone to police now go to the Office of Homeless Solutions, a shift she said was called for by both progressive activists and police. “Sometimes the best person to offer help to a person isn’t an armed officer, but a social worker or mental health expert,” Gallego said. 

Even as the city tested this new approach, Maria Walter, an unhoused person who lived in The Zone, felt disrupted as she wondered where to go next as city officials cleared the area.

“It doesn’t feel good. I don’t feel any safety,” said Walter, who was one of the hundreds who had to leave as the city finished its months-long dismantling of The Zone.

In its final weeks, soon-to-be former residents tried to gather their belongings while city workers swept up what they left behind. On some already cleared blocks, people returned to sleep on the sidewalk, covered by cheap blankets, like the kind used to pad furniture when moving. 

As the city cleared the last block, people wheeled their belongings out in carts. Those headed to a shelter tried to fit their belongings into already overstuffed vehicles. “It’s time to drastically downsize,” a city worker advised. 

Phoenix then opened a sanctioned campground for some 300 people a few blocks away from The Zone, offering meals and services on-site. This year, the city opened a new shelter that allows people to stay with pets and partners and more storage for their belongings. Phoenix plans to add over 500 shelter beds by the end of 2025.

But even with efforts to open new shelters, Arizona still faces a shortage of shelter beds and affordable housing, said Jamie Podratz, public policy advocate at the Arizona Housing Coalition. The coalition, which includes organizations and municipalities providing homeless services, opposes Proposition 312 because the refunds would take away money necessary to provide services that reduce homelessness. Emphasizing clearing encampments or enforcing nuisance laws would only displace unhoused people, and make it harder for them to access help, the coalition argues.

“What’s important is what we do from here—and that’s try to increase the supports available and increase the community response rather than pull away much needed resources to address it,” said Podratz.

Despite its win in the case, the legal battle over Navajo Wash pressured Tucson officials to use a firmer hand when dealing with encampments, especially since the decision has been sent to the Arizona Court of Appeals for review following the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling, said Paul Gattone. A civil rights attorney who has worked on several lawsuits to block the city from displacing unhoused people, Gattone described how Tucson officials have closely monitored Navajo Wash to prevent drug use and ramped up enforcement across the city.

​​”It wasn’t much of a victory for the homeless because the city is still doing sweeps,” he said.

In late September, Tucson officials cleared an encampment at Santa Rita Park, a little over a mile southeast of downtown. The park has baseball diamonds, a skatepark and a growing population of unhoused people.

Leticia Valdez organized her belongings on a cart as police and the cleanup crew assembled. She had planned to stay up all night to prepare, but was too tired. She didn’t have a plan beyond moving her belongings across the street. “It’s just a hassle,” Valdez said. ”Some people don’t have nowhere to go.” 

The fight in Arizona is being replicated, in some form, across the country. 

In October, Florida enacted a law conceived by the Cicero Institute, a leading critic of Housing First, banning unhoused people from camping in public and allowing residents, businesses and state prosecutors to sue cities for not quickly clearing out encampments. Like Goldwater, Cicero petitioned the Supreme Court to eliminate protections of unhoused people in the Grants Pass case. 

Cicero has propagated aspects of its model legislation in states across the U.S. In Tennessee, sleeping on public property is a felony. Over the summer, Kentucky passed a law allowing property owners to use, in some cases, lethal force, against people shoplifting, trespassing or illegally camping. Meanwhile, presidential candidate Donald Trump has promoted camping bans except for sanctioned campgrounds. 

A proposition on California’s November ballot similarly uses the criminal justice system as a main tool for managing homelessness. The ballot measure ramps up criminal penalties for certain drug and theft offenses, but allows people charged with those crimes to avoid prison by completing an addiction or mental health treatment program. Breaking with Housing First advocates who hold that individuals with stable housing are more successful at treating behavioral health issues, proponents of the measure claim involuntary treatment works “because people who receive treatment have a much greater chance of staying housed,” according to the campaign’s website. 

Gattone, the Tucson civil rights attorney, argues that displacing a person violating the law simply for living outside doesn’t fix the problem, it just moves that problem someplace else. Arizona has thousands fewer shelter beds than unhoused people, meaning there is no feasible way for cities to enforce the law without simply sweeping people from one location to another.

“The answer to homelessness is housing,” Gattone said. “People have to live somewhere. They are not going to disappear.”

The post The Next Front in the Fight Over Homelessness Is on the Arizona Ballot appeared first on Bolts.

Chicago Police officers have secretly pulled over as many as 20,000 more drivers per month in the past year than they have reported publicly, in violation of a 2003 law requiring them to document every traffic stop, a Bolts and Injustice Watch investigation has found.

The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.

The findings come at a time when the police department’s targeting of Black neighborhoods with thousands of traffic stops has come under increased scrutiny, following the March killing of Dexter Reed, who was shot 13 times by five plainclothes officers just seconds after being pulled over for a seatbelt violation. The officers said Reed fired at them first.

While many police departments across the country have moved away from the use of traffic stops as a crime-fighting strategy, Chicago remains a stark outlier, with more stops per capita than most major cities, according to a recent analysis by the New York Times.

Pulling over drivers for minor traffic infractions like a broken tail light, or turning without a signal has been a central part of Chicago’s policing tactics for nearly a decade. Officers have used targeted enforcement of minor traffic issues in Black and Latinx neighborhoods as a way to find and remove illegal guns from the streets. The goal, former top police officials have said, is to deter drivers from carrying guns and drugs. Critics say the practice is, at best, an ineffective waste of city resources, and, at worst, an illegal violation of people’s rights that puts drivers and officers in harm’s way.

Snelling has pledged to change course, and earlier this year launched a process to bring traffic enforcement under the oversight of the federal consent decree CPD has been under since 2019. Community groups and advocates pushed back on this effort, arguing the slow-moving consent decree process would delay real traffic stop reform. The sweeping set of court-ordered reforms was designed to address patterns of discriminatory misconduct, excessive force, and rights abuses found to be prevalent in the department, but so far the department has fully met just seven percent of its obligations under the decree. 

The significant number of undocumented traffic stops threatens to undermine any reform efforts and obscures the true impact of the police encounters from oversight groups, preventing them from fully understanding which drivers are stopped, and where in the city they are concentrated.

As Snelling moves to bring traffic stops under federal oversight, the lack of transparency also calls into question whether the department will make a good faith effort to curb the problematic police conduct, or if leaders will instead just sweep those patterns out of view from the public.

“It is quite concerning, especially if CPD is intentionally not recording traffic stops so they can claim they’re fixing the problem, when all they’re doing is hiding it behind an absence of data,” said Alexandra Block, director of the Criminal Legal System & Policing Project at the ACLU of Illinois. 

Snelling declined to be interviewed for this report. A spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to comment.

When asked about the unreported stops, the police department’s public relations staff stood by the publicly-reported numbers.

“The Chicago Police Department is committed to implementing substantive and lasting reforms rooted in constitutional policing as we work to build trust in our communities. Superintendent Snelling is committed to ensuring traffic stops are being used effectively,” a Snelling spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

200,000 traffic stops missing from reports to state last year

Traffic stops have grown increasingly central to the reform goals of civil rights and police accountability groups in Chicago since the department began to reel in the use of pedestrian stops nearly a decade ago. Police moved away from the controversial tactic known as stop-and-frisk after a wave of scrutiny launched by the police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014, as well as the botched investigation and coverup by police, prosecutors, and the mayor. The following year, the ACLU of Illinois released a report finding officers regularly targeted Black Chicagoans and violated their Fourth Amendment rights using stop-and-frisk; the city eventually agreed to a legal settlement to begin to reduce the practice.

But as footstops plunged, traffic enforcement in Black neighborhoods soared. Many dubbed this pattern the new stop-and-frisk; police were still initiating millions of encounters with civilians to fish for guns and evidence of other crimes, but by stopping cars rather than pedestrians.

Watchdogs were able to sound the alarm on the massive increase in traffic stops in Black neighborhoods thanks to the Illinois Traffic Stop Study, a 2003 law that requires law enforcement agencies to report the details of every traffic stop to the Illinois Department of Transportation, including a car’s make and model, the driver’s race, and the justification for the stop. With this granular level of data, the state’s racial profiling oversight board is supposed to identify troubling disparities and advise police departments to make changes.

The study has repeatedly shown clear disparities in how often officers pulled over Black drivers. In 2020, Chicago police stopped Black drivers at seven times the rate of white drivers and searched Black drivers or their cars more than three times as often. The ACLU of Illinois sued the city in 2023 on behalf of five drivers who alleged they were racially profiled and had their rights violated in dozens of traffic stops, many of which were not reported.

But the board has never had an accurate picture of the full scope of traffic stops, because the numbers Chicago police reported to the state didn’t match their own internal records.

Our analysis of the radio dispatch data found nearly 200,000 traffic stops last year that were not properly documented or reported to the state.

Traffic stops have, in fact, been falling since early 2023, but not by as much as the state data appears to show. According to the publicly reported data, Chicago police made about 74,000 fewer stops from January through April, a 35 percent drop from the same period last year. But the police dispatch data shows the true reduction in stops was less than 59,000.

“It presents issues for effective oversight and accountability. If you don't know what's happening on the ground, it is hard to make accurate judgments about it. But the data that does exist does paint a pretty clear picture,” said Amy Thompson, an attorney for Impact for Equity who also sits on the state racial profiling oversight board.

She said the board is developing a survey to uncover why some police departments are not in compliance with the law, but it is only an advisory panel that doesn’t have the authority to make sure police are accurately reporting stops.

Data reported to the state in the first half of this year show the gap between stops of Black and white drivers narrowing to three times as many, according to an analysis by WBEZ Chicago.

But with so many stops happening off-the-books, those reports are a misleading portrayal of the purported improvements. Since the radio communications data doesn’t track details like the race of the driver and whether officers did a search, watchdogs groups can’t calculate the extent of the disparities in the off-the-books stops.

"It raises the concern that potentially the stops that are missing are ones where there are harms that are not being surfaced, or where there are particularly egregious incidents that are happening,” Thompson said.

CPD did not answer questions about why there are so many traffic stops logged in the radio system with no paper trail. But two former Chicago Police commanders said in interviews that a small amount of the discrepancy could be due to dispatchers mistakenly logging other kinds of officer activity like a footstop as a traffic stop, or by backlogs of paper traffic stop documents that are delayed from being entered into the record-keeping system or lost altogether.

Jacquez Beasley, one of the drivers suing the city over the traffic stops, suspects his experience of being searched without consent during a traffic stop is far more common for Black drivers than police report to the public.

When he and his brother were pulled over for plate violation in 2021 by a plainclothes officer in an unmarked SUV, the situation quickly spiraled out of control, Beasley said in an interview. After asking Beasley and his brother for identification, the officer called for backup, he said. Within minutes, a large group of undercover cops swarmed the car, ordered them to get out of their car, and detained them.

"The way they flooded the scene, the way they pulled up like that, it escalated so quick. They went from asking my name to putting my brother in cuffs in just minutes,” Beasley said. 

When they asked to search Beasley’s car, he felt he didn’t really have much of a choice. "There was no cause to even search the car. But I knew there wasn't any saying no. I just wanted to get it over with,” he said.

The search turned up nothing, and Beasley was never ticketed for the traffic infraction, he said. The officers still should have made a detailed account of the encounter, under the state law, but there is no record in the traffic stop data that the officers stopped and searched Beasley and his brother, according to the lawsuit. Beasley said he believes officers didn’t bother to report the traffic stop because they didn’t find any drugs or weapons to justify the unnecessary search.

“They didn't find anything. If they found something, they would’ve put the report in. But when they screw up, they want to make themselves look good,” Beasley said.

A previous investigation by Block Club Chicago and Injustice Watch found Chicago Police use traffic stops in Black neighborhoods to target illegal gun possession, though officers had to make over 150 stops for each gun found. And even when officers did make a gun arrest, they often failed to report that the arrest began with a traffic stop.

Missing Chicago police data hinders oversight efforts

In the aftermath of the murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014 and the scathing Department of Justice investigation that followed, a constellation of police oversight agencies were created in Chicago to address the department’s history of unconstitutional and discriminatory policing.

All of those bodies have been stymied by the department’s inconsistent record-keeping and lack of transparency.

The independent monitors assigned to oversee the city’s reform of stop-and-frisk under the settlement with the ACLU of Illinois noted in a series of reports the “unknown quantity” of missing stop-and-frisk documents made it difficult to assess whether officers were complying with the new standards. The monitoring team made recommendations to improve transparency, but unreported stops persisted.

An inquiry last year by Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg into how long it takes for Chicago Police to respond to 911 calls for help was similarly limited by missing data in up to half of all 911 calls. This prevented any analysis of disparities in 911 response times across the city and the factors that contribute to delayed responses, according to the report. 

A separate OIG investigation into use-of-force incidents found Black Chicagoans are far more likely to be stopped, searched, and have an encounter with police escalate into a physical altercation. But the Inspector General’s findings were again limited by unreliable data marked by undocumented encounters.

In the course of investigating patterns in use-of-force incidents, Witzburg’s team examined data on the encounters where such complaints often emerge, including traffic stops. Police provided investigators with data only from traffic stops where officers filled out the required documents—but not those tracked through radio communication records.

"There's a reason that CPD members are required to collect that data on every traffic stop. It is so that oversight entities and the department itself and community stakeholders can get a complete view of the department's traffic stop activity. That only works if they are, in fact, collecting all the data,” Witzburg told Bolts and Injustice Watch.

Although this investigation confirms CPD leadership internally tracks undocumented traffic stops using radio communications data, the Inspector General’s report notes that the police department “was not able to provide OIG with any empirical estimate of rates of unreported or improperly reported stops or uses of force.”

Of the various oversight bodies meant to check CPD’s authority, only the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) can investigate misconduct allegations and punish individual officers. It, too, has dealt with incomplete data in completing its investigations.

The most common complaints the office receives involve claims an officer stopped or searched someone in violation of their rights. During the course of those investigations, the agency regularly disciplines officers for failing to report the stop that resulted in the complaint, COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten said in an interview. In those situations, COPA must use other means, such as GPS and bodycam footage, to gather details about the misconduct incident.

"We're not necessarily limited in our ability to hold officers accountable and find information and evidence about those traffic stops. But we are limited by who complains about them,” Kersten said. “If there is no documentation about these stops, or we don't receive a citizen complaint, then we are not going to have any knowledge that it happened.”

Since 2022, COPA has expanded its capacity to follow patterns across misconduct incidents that point to an underlying issue in police procedures that the agency can advise to fix, Kersten said. The agency's Policy Research and Analysis Division is currently laying the groundwork for a study of the trends around the undocumented stops that COPA's investigators regularly flag, Kersten said. 

"The fatal shooting of Dexter Reed, and the nature of that stop, it shines an unfortunate light on the fact that we as a city need to better understand why this is a police tool that is being used, and what harms it may be causing,” Kersten said. "We are looking at trends across districts. We are looking at trends across different types of officers, to identify if there are unique patterns.”

Community advocates push for new traffic stop policies

Even before the police killing of Dexter Reed, a large coalition of community groups and advocates have called for police to adopt a formal policy to conduct fewer traffic stops. 

In April, Snelling asked U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who oversees the federal consent decree, to bring traffic stops under the court’s supervision. 

Many advocates would prefer that traffic stops come under the purview of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, an oversight body created in 2021 which has the power to set police policy and call for the removal of a superintendent. The commission has asked Pallmeyer to avoid overtaking the community oversight’s role in monitoring traffic stops, since the panel has no authority to set policy on issues under federal supervision.

Advocacy groups have presented the commission with a policy agenda that has three main components: banning officers from using traffic enforcement to fish for unrelated crime, limiting traffic stops for non-safety violations, and restricting officers from asking drivers for consent to search them without suspicion of criminal activity. The commission will have a public hearing on Aug. 27 to gather input on how communities want the commission to intervene, and what a policy would look like. 

A number of U.S. cities have begun to phase out some traffic stops as a primary crime deterrent strategy, saying the risk for racially-biased harm outweighs potential public safety benefits. Philadelphia was the first major city to ban low-level traffic stops as a way to prevent racial profiling in 2021, and since then, a wave of cities including San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Minneapolis have implemented similar policies.

“A number of cities have policies that refocus police away from making minor stops to prioritize activities that actually affect traffic safety, like dangerous driving,” said Daniella Gilbert, director of the Redefining Public Safety initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, a national policy group. 

Some jurisdictions that have limited officers from making non-safety traffic stops have been able to focus resources on moving violations and drunk driving, resulting in safer roads and lower racial disparities, studies show.

“There are benefits to road safety itself, in addition to mitigating the erosion of trust and disparate impact that these kinds of stops result in,” Gilbert said. 

Prosecutors in Ramsey County, Minnesota, home to St. Paul, said in 2021 that they would stop charging arrests stemming solely from non-public-safety traffic stops, five years after a police officer in a nearby suburb killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop for a broken taillight. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recently said her office would follow suit, but with just a few months left in office, it’s unclear if Foxx’s proposal will be implemented or maintained by her successor.

In the meantime, advocates are continuing to press for a stronger CPD policy to reduce the number of unnecessary stops, but any such efforts will be hampered as long as CPD continues to underreport traffic stops.

As the federal court mulls bringing traffic stops under the consent decree, there’s skepticism among residents and civil rights groups that anything will change soon. They’re disillusioned by Chicago Police’s already extremely low compliance with the consent decree reforms and the department’s track record of misleading oversight agencies to avoid accountability, said C.M.D. Chiimeh, an organizer for Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation, at the consent decree hearing.

“It is evident the current approach is ineffective and inefficient. The issues surrounding pretextual traffic stops need to be addressed now. And it has been proven the consent decree is incapable of doing that," Chiimeh said. "Putting this issue in the consent decree … would only continue to perpetuate overpolicing, degrade community trust, perpetuate racial disparities, and squander valuable resources associated with CPD's handling of traffic stops.”

The post Chicago Police Made Nearly 200,000 Secret Traffic Stops Last Year appeared first on Bolts.

Andrew Warren is running to win back his old job as Tampa’s top prosecutor. Since the Democrat joined the race in April, he has released campaign videos, basked in endorsements, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars—all the staples of a typical campaign.

But this campaign is anything but typical. Two years ago, Warren was abruptly suspended from his office by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who said he had neglected his duties because of statements such as a promise to not prosecute abortion cases. DeSantis summarily replaced him with Susan Lopez, a Republican who immediately reversed some of Warren’s signature policies, including his effort to stop the aggressive prosecutions of Black cyclists and pedestrians in Hillsborough County. 

Voters will now weigh in for the first time since DeSantis ousted the state attorney they elected. Lopez is running for a full term, but it’s Warren who won the office the last two times it was on the ballot, in 2016 and 2020. If he wins the Democratic nomination next week, he’ll face Lopez, who is running unopposed in the GOP primary, in November. (Editor’s note: Warren prevailed in the Aug. 20 Democratic primary; he will face Lopez on Nov. 5.)

The circumstances of Warren’s removal loom large over his third run. Hillsborough County has leaned Democratic in the past, but if Warren wins, DeSantis could try suspending him again. Warren filed lawsuits arguing that DeSantis exceeded his authority when he removed him the first time, and a federal appeals court earlier this year kept his case alive. Some experts say it’d be harder for the governor to suspend him again in the future, but these legal questions remain unsettled.

“Every Democratic candidate in Florida has to campaign under the threat of DeSantis removing them solely because they’re a Democrat, solely for political reasons,” Warren told Bolts.

Last year, DeSantis also suspended the elected Democratic prosecutor of Orlando, Monique Worrell, whose sentencing practices he disagreed with. He had already removed Broward County’s Democratic sheriff, replacing him with a new sheriff who backtracked on a local reform.  

Lopez, too, rolled back Warren’s reforms within just days of replacing him. On Aug. 8, 2022, just four days after her appointment, she sent a memo to her staff announcing changes to the office’s policies. Among them: She lifted Warren’s restrictions on prosecuting people when their charges stemmed from bike and pedestrian stops conducted by the Tampa police.

“Effective immediately, any policy my predecessor put in place that called for presumptive non-enforcement of the laws of Florida is immediately rescinded. This includes the bike stop and pedestrian stop policy,” Lopez said in her memo. DeSantis had named this reform among his reasons for removing Waren, saying that it demonstrates a “fundamentally flawed and lawless understanding of his duties as a state attorney.”

Warren had set up his policy in the wake of a 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation that revealed that the majority of cyclists stopped by the Tampa police were Black. The story sparked an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that reached the same conclusion in 2016: Of 9,121 bicycle stops made by Tampa police over a 20-month period, 73 percent of those involved Black cyclists. Tampa’s population is 26 percent Black. 

The data ignited organizing in Hillsborough County. Civil rights organizations demanded reforms from both the local police and the state attorney’s office, which handles prosecutions. In some of these cases, the office was ensnaring cyclists in the criminal legal system by charging them with misdemeanors over nonviolent actions related to the bike stops, such as riding away from police or refusing to show identification.

Once he became the state attorney in 2017, members of the local chapter of the NAACP met with Warren to ask him to stop prosecuting those cases. “We were having conversations over and over again,” recalled Yvette Lewis, president of the Hillsborough County NAACP. The effort took years, with Warren forming a Racial Justice Work Group to examine the issue in the fall of 2020, after that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and finally releasing a new policy in January 2022.

In a memo to his staff, Warren instructed them to adopt a default approach of not prosecuting nonviolent, misdemeanor cases that result from these stops, broadening the policy’s purview to include pedestrian stops as well as bike stops. He also said line prosecutors should weigh whether the facts of the alleged crime still merit prosecution. “Actual or even perceived racial disparities in the use of bicycle and pedestrian stops undermine trust within the communities that law enforcement serves,” Warren said in a memo. 

In an interview with Bolts, Warren said “the reason why we were taking a critical look at those cases is because we don’t want to encourage that stop in the first place.” 

Prosecuting those stops without first examining them, he said, was “perpetuating the revolving door to the criminal justice system.” 

“Obviously, we want people to comply with law enforcement,” he said. “We also don’t want to put more people into the system that can have a negative impact on their ability to earn a living and potentially cost taxpayer dollars to prosecute them and take away their freedom when they hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place.”

Tampa’s Black residents cheered the change, Lewis said. “The community felt like, OK, they can take a deep breath.”

Since Lopez lifted Warren’s policy and signaled to police that the stops they made would get prosecuted again, the fear of aggressive prosecution has returned, Lewis says. 

“We were definitely devastated by what she did,” she said. “It took us 10 steps back when it comes to helping the most vulnerable people that need help.”

Lewis said she has met with Lopez about the change but has made no progress toward switching it back. “I don’t think she gets it at all,” she said. “She’s never walked in our shoes. When you try to talk to her to get understanding, she doesn’t come with an open mind.”

Erin Maloney, a spokesperson for Lopez’s office, told Bolts in an email that Warren’s policy was just for show. “By the time Andrew Warren instituted that policy, Tampa Police had already changed how bike stops were conducted altogether,” she wrote. “He took a problem that didn’t exist and offered a solution.” 

But Maloney also faulted Warren for going too far in refusing to enforce Florida law, saying, “State Attorney Lopez follows the law instead of creating blanket policies that change the law.”

In November 2022, months after she became state attorney, Lopez gave a deposition in which she seemed to confirm that the Tampa police were still sending over bike stop cases to the state’s attorney’s office during Warren’s tenure. Lopez worked as a staff prosecutor in Warren’s office for part of his tenure before she became a county judge in late 2021. She said she saw those cases come in, and criticized Warren for how he handled them. (Lopez gave this deposition as part of one of Warren’s lawsuits to be reinstated.)

It’s unclear how many people have been prosecuted under Lopez in cases that stem from bike stops. Maloney said the office does “not have a way” to  determine whether past charges were tied to such stops. Still, a review of the Hillsborough County court system database shows that Lopez’s office has pursued criminal charges in such cases. 

In March, for example, police arrested a 31-year-old Black man who was walking in South Tampa because he did not comply with commands to stop and show his hands. He was charged with resisting arrest without violence, a misdemeanor, and detained on a $500 bond. Lopez’s office took the case to trial and lost; the jury found the man not guilty. 

In another case, prosecutors sought charges against a homeless Black man who fled police on his bicycle after they tried to stop him for disobeying traffic signals. The case was dismissed, only after a judge declared the man incompetent.

Warren staunchly defended his past policy in an interview with Bolts, but he also was vague when asked whether he planned to bring it back if re-elected. 

He said he would look at the data to see whether there was a reason to implement it, noting that these cases make up just a small fraction of the 60,000 cases referred to the office each year. He also said he would “keep doing the types of things that we did before.”

Warren may be worried that DeSantis will use whatever promise he makes against him. In early January, Warren announced that he wouldn’t run for state attorney because he feared that the governor would just be able to remove him again. Up until that point, courts had rejected his pleas to overturn DeSantis’ suspension; even a federal district judge who said that DeSantis had probably acted unconstitutionally also ruled that he lacked the authority to reinstate Warren. 

Warren changed his mind about running after he secured a victory against DeSantis in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which instructed the lower court to reconsider reinstating Warren. 

Elizabeth Strauss, a local attorney, does not want Democrats to take the risk. She is running against Warren in next week’s primary and says she is a safer choice.

“A vote for Warren is a vote for Suzy,” she told Bolts repeatedly in an interview, warning that DeSantis could intervene to make sure Lopez remains in office if Warren wins.

“I just want people to vote with an informed decision and knowing that, okay, if I vote for him, there’s a chance he could get removed Day One,” Strauss said. “There’s other ways to challenge this and bring awareness to what the governor did without having the voters throw away their votes and end up with somebody that’s basically going to be his puppet.”

Strauss said she would not sign onto national policy statements like the ones Warren had joined while in office, which vowed to not prosecute cases involving abortions or anti-transgender laws. “I don’t plan on making myself vulnerable,” she said. In an email follow-up, she explained she would take a different approach to tackling issues with police stops by forming a civil rights unit. “While I will not refuse to prosecute based on any blanket policies, a Civil Rights Unit which actively investigates these matters is a more effective way to deter abuse of power by law enforcement officers,” she said.

Warren dismissed Strauss’ concerns, saying that he was focused on winning the general election in November. He has asked federal courts to expedite his case before the election, to no avail so far.

Carissa Byrne Hessick, director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina, says she can see voters reacting to Warren’s comeback effort one of two ways. “It could be the sort of thing that really motivates voters to go to the polls and check the box for him,” she said. But, she added, “They might think that was too much chaos, and we don’t want to be fighting with the state.”

Robin Lockett, Tampa Bay regional director of Florida Rising, a voting rights advocacy organization that has endorsed Warren, told Bolts that she falls in the former group. 

“I think it’s brave of Andrew to still do what’s right for the people,” she said. “He can’t run in fear.”

Some Democratic voters, meanwhile, may be living in trepidation that the governor will just keep disregarding election results, no matter the office and the Democrat who wins. Other candidates running for local office have faced a similar cloud. “Sometimes it feels like a set up—or it’s all just theater,” a Democrat running for prosecutor in St. Petersburg told Bolts two years ago. This year, Worrell is seeking her old job back in Orlando, much like Warren is in Tampa.

At a political forum in May that featured the three state attorney candidates, as well as two candidates running for public defender, one attendee told them, “All of you are subject to being suspended by the governor.” 

The post Tampa Voters Get Their Say Two Years After DeSantis Axed Their Democratic Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.

Now, these experiences have led Cofer, currently a senior policy director at the organization Public Health Advocates, to seek the top job of California’s capital city. Cofer came in first in the nonpartisan mayoral primary in March, an upset victory for a young, Black, female first-time candidate running against several established politicians. In the general election in November, she is facing off against Kevin McCarty, a former Sacramento city council member who more recently served several terms in the state legislature. 

If she wins, Cofer has vowed to take a public health approach to setting policy in Sacramento. “Public health is about maximizing the two things that matter most to humans: the number of years in your life, and the quality of life in your years,” she told Bolts. “And I see that as the major charge of every public-facing institution.” 

For Cofer, this means seeing the city as an ecosystem, understanding homelessness, gun violence and other social problems as akin to infectious disease, and zeroing in on preventing their spread rather than simply treating its effects. “It’s one thing to fight a symptom, it’s another thing to eradicate a disease,” said Asantewaa Boykin, a nurse and activist against police violence who has worked with Cofer on community issues. 

While McCarty has espoused a fairly standard Democratic vision for homeless policy, speaking of the importance of services while also working on laws to restrict where unhoused people can camp, Cofer has called for stopping sweeps of homeless encampments and expanding and improving “safe ground” camping sites. She has also advocated for more funding for violence intervention networks, overhauling the city’s well-meaning but flawed alternative crisis response system, and using the budget to advance a set of clearly articulated values around health and welfare. 

As the primary results showed, hers is an enticing pitch to many in the city who are frustrated that the conventional solutions—a jumbled mixture of services, imperfect temporary shelter options, and homeless sweeps—aren’t working. But Cofer faces various barriers to realizing her vision: a $60-odd-million budget deficit, a district attorney and a state government bent on enforcing the criminalization of homelessness, and housed and homeless residents alike who are deeply mistrustful that anything will meaningfully change. 

In response to an affordable housing shortage and a growing number of people sleeping outdoors, Sacramento has, like many of its counterparts, tried everything from services and temporary housing to criminalization. In 2021, now-outgoing mayor Darrell Steinberg unveiled a costly plan to increase shelter options, but the following year, the city and county each passed ordinances restricting camping on sidewalks or near businesses, infrastructure, and the city’s American River Parkway. 

Then, in the fall of 2022, voters approved Measure O, which outlawed camping on public property. Cofer opposed Measure O, while Cofer’s mayoral opponent McCarty worked on a bill to outlaw camping on the parkway that he suggested could work in tandem with these other restrictive measures. McCarty did not respond to a request for comment for this piece.

Homeless advocates like Anthony Prince, a lawyer for the Sacramento Homeless Union, whose 2,800 members represent nearly half of the city’s unhoused population, argue that the city has wasted much of the money it has spent under Steinberg’s plan. “It was about pop up tents, mass congregant shelters, a few tiny homes scattered here and there, some so-called safe parking sites and safe camping sites,” he said. “This is not housing.”

Charley Willison, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Department of Public & Ecosystem Health, called shelter “a really important first step—if it is used as a transitional housing mechanism. We can’t have shelter being used as the final step.” But she also noted that too many cities create behavioral requirements, like curfews or complete abstention from substances, for shelters that disqualify whole swaths of people. 

Niki Jones, the Executive Director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, believes that the city’s vast expenditures have accomplished little and left housed residents pessimistic, inclined to blame their unhoused neighbors, and thus more likely to support punitive measures against them. “There’s this idea that all this money has gone into homelessness—why isn’t it solved?” she said. “There’s a woman who lives outside who says it really well—she says, ‘They treat us like we blew $80 million.’” 

Meanwhile, homeless advocates in Sacramento say that the municipal government’s repeated  sweeps of unhoused people continue to be destabilizing and traumatizing. It’s a practice that Willison says has been proven ineffective over the long term. “The evidence base shows us that these punitive policies, whether that’s arrests, encampment closures, without links to housing, all make homelessness worse,” she told Bolts. 

Part of the underlying issue, Cofer argues, is that the city has never set explicit priorities for what it wants to accomplish each year, instead opting to create a “status quo budget” based on the previous year’s expenditures. “Unfortunately, when you do that, you keep getting what you’ve always got,” she said. 

To address the root issue of affordable housing and stop people from falling into homelessness in the first place, Cofer supports Sacramento Forward, a policy package put forth by several current city council members that aims to enact “Just Cause” renter protections, mandate a certain percentage of new housing be reserved for low- and very-low-income residents, and prevent corporate purchases of existing housing by giving priority to tenant buyers. If elected, Cofer says she’ll use her power as mayor to expand support for the package and place individual policy items on the agenda for direct approval or an eventual ballot initiative. 

But then, of course, there is the issue of the nearly 9,300 people currently homeless in Sacramento County. Prince has recently served as the lawyer for Camp Resolution, a “safe ground” site that allows people to camp without police interference at minimal expense to the city. Prince stresses that this is not a permanent solution for his clients—“they don’t want to stay there forever,” he told Bolts—but it is safer and more stable than sleeping alone on the street. 

The city initially signed and then renegotiated a lease with the organization Safe Ground Sacramento that promises it will not clear the camp until all of its residents get into permanent housing, but Prince says that officials have also intensified sweeps around the camp and sought various ways to compel residents to leave. Last week, Safe Ground announced that it cannot fulfill the terms of its lease, including providing water and electricity, which Prince worries will give the city another reason to void the agreement.

Cofer has praised the “safe ground” concept as a low-cost interim solution and said she’d extend Camp Resolution’s lease, open more sites around the city, and ensure that any sites have running water, electricity, shower services, and other amenities that allow the people there to live with dignity. She sees the sites as a form of stabilization that might allow people a moment to breathe and get connected to resources that can pave the way for more long-term stability. “60 percent of our unhoused folks have disabilities,” she said. “Are they all receiving disability? Are they all receiving food stamps? Are they all receiving the services that they’re eligible for?”

Cofer also criticizes the city government’s reluctance to robustly fund a suite of programs that could prevent violence, homelessness, and unnecessary police encounters. In 2018, Cofer and others advocated for the passage of Measure U, which would have doubled an existing half-cent sales tax. The revenue from the first half-cent, around $50 million per year at that time, went largely to the police department, but the city said the additional half-cent would go toward things like inclusive economic development targeted at historically redlined neighborhoods, and an affordable housing fund. “That was the campaign promise and that was the way that this measure was marketed to voters,” Cofer said. 

But after the measure passed, most of the revenue from the tax ended up going back to the police department—not illegal, Cofer stressed, but “a breach of trust.” She advocated for the creation of a committee that would advise the council on how to better invest the funds from Measure U, and ended up chairing it from 2019 until the end of 2022. During her time there, the committee piloted a participatory budgeting process that invested money in community-led projects in two Sacramento neighborhoods, which Cofer hopes to continue and focus on youth-related projects if she’s elected. 

Cofer is clear-eyed about the way that Sacramento’s policing budget strains the city’s coffers and takes resources away from other departments. She notes that it’s gone up around $100 million in just four years to reach over $250 million today, and proposes a realignment of the Measure U dollars towards their intended purpose and a return to the 2018-2019 police budget of around $150 million. McCarty is clear that he will not cut police funding if elected. 

But Cofer is also leery about being portrayed as anti-police. She stresses that she empathizes with law enforcement officers and compares their plight to that of teachers: public sector employees burdened with the effects of social issues far outside their remit. 

One attempt to disrupt this paradigm came in the form of the Department of Community Response (DCR), which Mayor Steinberg debuted during the 2020 protests. The idea was to form a team of social workers and mental health specialists to respond to 911 calls related to mental health and homelessness instead of police. But Boykin, whose organization Mental Health First was already doing similar work, told Bolts the department engaged with her only superficially, and conversations soon ended. Jones, who has volunteered with Mental Health First, said that DCR has since betrayed its initial mandate as a police alternative and become imbricated in the broader apparatus of sweeps, displacement, and criminalization. 

“What really came into being was actually just a team that responded to unhoused folks, usually sent there before police,” she said. “They don’t respond instead of police. They respond as a precursor.” 

Cofer wants CDR properly staffed and resourced—she said it needs at least $7 million in additional yearly funds—so that it can fulfill its initial mission of taking over various 911 call types from the police department. This would, in turn, free officers up to respond to calls that involve violent crime, and leave the department less reliant on overtime. “If we’re talking about baking this into 911 response, that means that we have to have staff available 24 hours a day,” she said. “You kind of have to commit.” She also says she’d more closely collaborate with community partners like Boykin’s Mental Health First that have experience doing this work already.

In interviews, both Prince and Willison emphasized that any lasting solutions to the city’s homelessness crisis must come from listening to the people most impacted by it, rather than simply following housed residents’ complaints. 

Generally, Willison said, “the needs, rights and preferences, including the health and well being of people experiencing homelessness, get completely circumvented” in policy discussions around homelessness. A public health approach must prioritize “being responsive to the needs of people experiencing homelessness themselves.” 

Of course, Cofer would also have to contend with the many constituents who want some measure of criminalization, if only because they’re exasperated by the city’s lack of progress on reducing homelessness. Cofer says that it’s understandable that Sacramentans have looked to fixes like the 2022 ballot measure that ramped up enforcement, which she framed as well-meaning but misguided. But convincing residents to be patient as the city attempts to implement longer-term solutions will be a challenge. And it could be a lonely fight, too. 

Sacramento’s District Attorney, Thien Ho, has sued the city twice for failing to enforce its anti-homeless ordinances, and has also threatened a lawsuit over Camp Resolution. And the recent Grants Pass decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made it harder for officials to argue that their hands are tied when it comes to criminalization. Shortly after Grants Pass, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to begin clearing encampments on state-owned land, and strongly suggested that local leaders follow suit. This could further alarm individual council members reluctant to assert the political will to oppose sweeps or build new safe ground sites in their district, leaving it harder for Cofer or any future mayor to get the votes they need to make significant changes on this front. 

Cofer said that she’ll try to work around these challenges by encouraging collaboration and setting an ambitious affirmative vision for Sacramento. “I want us to set the benchmarks. How many people are we going to house this year?” she told Bolts. “And I want the media and advocates and everyone to be able to call in, or go to the city’s website and see how are we doing towards that goal, and I want us to be unafraid of setting an ambitious goal and potentially failing.” 

The post The Epidemiologist Running for Mayor to Bring Public Health to Sacramento Politics appeared first on Bolts.

It started as a traffic stop for an alleged seatbelt violation. It escalated to a deadly encounter within seconds.

Since the release of body cam footage showing plainclothes police killing Dexter Reed in Chicago, loved ones and activists have demanded to know why the 26-year-old was stopped, and how a simple traffic stop left Reed dead, an officer wounded and cops firing nearly 100 shots in a residential neighborhood.

The traffic stop is part of a pattern that has increasingly targeted Black neighborhoods in recent years and activists say may violate people’s rights. The traffic stops have been called “the new stop-and-frisk.”

And they’ve been particularly aggressive on the city’s West Side, where Reed was stopped and killed. Activists have warned for years that these traffic stops can spark volatile encounters.

In fact, police pull over more Chicagoans in the Harrison (11th) Police District, where Reed was pulled over, than in any other district in the city, according to a Block Club Chicago analysis of police data. The vast majority of those stops don’t lead to tickets. 

One-tenth of all Chicago traffic stops happened in that district—averaging more than 154 stops per day—even though the area accounts for just 3 percent of Chicago’s population, according to a report by Impact for Equity. About 96 percent of people living in the district are Black or Latino, according to the report.  

“The strategy ends up creating a dangerous situation for everyone rather than contributing to any improvement of public safety in Chicago, said Amy Thompson, staff counsel for Impact for Equity. “Pretextual stops are creating danger, not finding danger.”

She thinks that Reed’s arrest illustrates that danger. “Five officers rushed out in plainclothes for a seat belt violation. It clearly was an attempt to fish for crime,” she said.

Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the oversight agency that investigates when officers shoot someone, raised concerns over the reason officers gave for stopping Reed. Investigators are uncertain how officers would have seen Reed wasn’t wearing a seat belt given their positions and the fact Reed’s SUV had tinted windows, chief administrator Andrea Kersten wrote in a letter to Police Supt. Larry Snelling, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. 

Newly released documents show the officers involved in the fatal shootout were being investigated for several other traffic stops that drivers said were unwarranted.

Police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who became Chicago’s top cop last year, has indicated the number of traffic stops is a problem, too. He has reversed course from previous administrations by pledging to reduce traffic stops. He also has committed to routinely training officers to ensure they act based on “reasonable articulable suspicion or probable cause,” he told neighbors at a town hall the day before footage of Reed’s killing was released.

“People have been sounding the alarm that the massive escalation in traffic stops would lead to more violent interactions because of the way this strategy is being conducted. These stops have become so routine and they are so ineffective that we knew we would have some tragedy like this occur as a result,” said Ed Yohnka, spokesperson of the Illinois ACLU. “The stops take place in this fashion where guns are drawn and there’s an immediate escalation of things.”

How stops surged after Chicago funneled more cops to traffic stops

Traffic stops in Black neighborhoods surged after a 2015 ACLU report found stop-and-frisk encounters were frequently baseless, targeted Black and Latino Chicagoans and routinely violated people’s rights. After the city agreed to reform the practice, Chicago police turned to traffic stops, Yohnka said.

The number of traffic stops Chicago Police reported to state watchdogs surged from under 100,000 in 2015 to nearly 600,000 in 2019, according to the Illinois Traffic and Pedestrian Stop Study. Documented stops dipped during the first years of the pandemic, but in 2023, Chicago police logged its second-highest number of stops in two decades, according to the Impact for Equity report. Black drivers are stopped up to seven times more often than white drivers, the state report showed. There are few traffic stops in districts where many police officers live while cops disproportionately stop drivers in Black neighborhoods.

But the study vastly underestimates Chicago police traffic stops. A Block Club investigation found hundreds of thousands of traffic stops annually that the department did not report to the state, in violation of a transparency law meant to address patterns of racial bias in police encounters.

Chicago police rely heavily on these encounters to search for contraband like illegal guns and drugs, stopping and arresting thousands more Black drivers than they report to oversight agencies, a Block Club investigation found. Officers make millions of stops but find guns in fewer than one of every 150 stops, Block Club and Injustice Watch found.  

“It is clear that this kind of stop has nothing to do with traffic safety. It is all about trying to search for guns and drugs,” Yohnka said. “If your expectation is to try to find a weapon, you look at that situation much differently than someone who rolled through a stop sign.”

Chicago police have funneled resources and manpower supposedly earmarked for other public safety strategies to make more traffic stops and scale up gun arrests, Bolts and Block Club have found.

The signature project of David Brown, Snelling’s predecessor, was a community policing unit purportedly launched to build trust between South and West Side residents and police, solve local problems and tackle crime at its root. By 2021, it was the largest unit in the department with over 800 officers.

But an analysis of dispatch records by Bolts showed those officers rarely did those positive community engagement activities. Instead, they were deployed primarily on the South and West sides as a roving strike team and the central enforcer of the growing traffic stop program. The community policing team stopped and searched more drivers than any other police unit, amounting to nearly one-third of the mountain of traffic stops in 2021, data shows.

The community team was dismantled amid outcry from watchdogs and legal turmoil from drivers and officers who complained of an illegal quota system that discriminated against Black Chicagoans. 

An ongoing class action lawsuit filed by Black and Latino drivers and the ACLU alleges the traffic stop strategy—and Brown’s community team in particular—flooded Black neighborhoods with traffic stops as a pretext to search drivers without their consent. The complaint references emails sent by then-Deputy Superintendent Ernest Cato III that ordered commanders to “utilize traffic stops to address violence.”

A former lieutenant on the community team sued the city in 2021, claiming leadership retaliated against him for refusing to  require officers under his command to conduct at least 10 stops daily. Though the community team was disbanded, Snelling reinstated it under a new name.

“Every officer in those units is not one that’s in the community, talking to neighbors and trying to find solutions,” Yohnka said. “Our clients described traffic stops where officers approach the car with their hand on their gun. People are being singled out and targeted for their race. It points out the danger of these stops, the inefficiency of the stops and the tragedy of the situation.”

Officers who are supposed to respond to 911 calls have also been steered toward traffic stops, a Block Club investigation found.

Hundreds of officers each day are assigned to rapid response duty, answering top-priority 911 calls and reducing long wait times that have become a pressing concern for many communities, according to police directives. It is supposed to allow beat officers to stay on their local patrols and build community relationships rather than respond to emergency calls.

But dispatch data shows rapid response officers rarely handle 911 calls. Instead, the majority of those officers are dedicated to traffic stops, the data shows.

“That’s a lot of manpower,” community organizer Arewa Winters said. “While we have all these issues going on everywhere, and you’re pulling people over with no good outcomes. Is that a practical use of manpower? Could you be somewhere else doing something else?”

A promise to reduce traffic stops: ‘We have to unlearn old things’ 

Snelling, the city’s first superintendent chosen under a new community oversight commission, has broken from past leadership by promising to address the harms caused by the mass use of traffic stops. 

Former Supt. Brown denied the existence of racially discriminatory stops and quotas and rejected evidence that stops were used to fish for gun possession cases.

At an April community hearing, Snelling acknowledged how traffic stops are part of the department’s strategy for dealing with guns, touting the department has scaled back on traffic stops while still increasing gun arrests. Snelling plans to continue to reduce traffic stops by training officers on different tactics, he said.

“We have to train the officers out of that and bring them into something new,” Snelling said. “In order to get them to learn new things, we have to have them unlearn the old things.”

Snelling said Chicago police have conducted 46,000 fewer stops in 2024 compared to the first quarter of last year. Police spokesperson Thomas Ahern declined to share a source for how the department tracked that reduction in stops, saying the statistic came from “computer data.”

To address the long-term issues with traffic stops, Snelling committed to bringing traffic stops under the supervision of the federal consent decree so the reductions “will be long lasting after I am gone,” he said.

But many are skeptical and urge the superintendent to take more immediate action. Only 6 percent of the requirements from the consent decree have been met in the five years since it took effect, according to a recent report.

“Whether or not Snelling views traffic stops differently, in order for community to have clarity on what their interactions with law enforcement will be, and even so police has clarity on what they can and cannot do, there needs to be a formal policy on these pretextual stops,” said Thompson of Impact for Equity.

When the goal is to investigate unrelated crime, officers are motivated to escalate a traffic stop to search for contraband, not deescalate the situation, Winters said. The tactic widely used in Black neighborhoods thrusts hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans each day into a high-risk situation that could turn lethal at any moment.

Investigators concluded Reed shot at officers first. But the focus on who fired first distracts from the bigger picture, Winters said: Neither the officers nor Reed were in a potentially deadly situation until police pulled Reed over. 

“The conversation needs to begin with what the police started with and how they approached that young man.”

It is reminiscent of when officers killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop near Minneapolis in 2016, Winters said. Officers used a broken taillight as a pretext to stop Castile and investigate him for an unrelated armed robbery nearby, an investigation showed. Within a minute of the encounter, officers fired at Castile while his girlfriend and her 4-year-old child were in the car.

That same year, Winters’ nephew Pierre Loury was killed after officers pulled over a car he was in to investigate a shooting earlier that day. After the 16-year-old tried to run away, an officer shot Loury after the teen climbed a fence.

“I know so many other families who have lost loved ones to police. We’re retraumatized, we’re frustrated, we’re angry, we’re hurt,” Winters said. “It’s truly overwhelming. But at the same time, we have to fight. We have to push back on the narratives that they try to spin.”

The post Behind Dexter Reed’s Police Killing, a Surge in Traffic Stops on Chicago’s West Side appeared first on Bolts.

The study comes at a time when many states are ramping up punishment in response to crime, while leaving public services largely underfunded. One of the study’s authors, Catherine Maclean, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, tells Bolts that policymakers should keep in mind the critical value of a strong social safety net for stabilizing communities. 

To study these relationships, Maclean and her coauthors examined crime rates in Tennessee before and after that state disenrolled some 200,000 people from Medicaid, with little warning, in 2005. That was and still remains one of the most sweeping state-level Medicaid drop-offs in U.S. history.

By 2007, the study finds, the crime rate in the median Tennessee county had increased by almost 17 percent, with large increases observed in both violent and non-violent crime; the study attributes this to the disenrollment through a series of causal analyses. “Losing Medicaid induced changes in economic standing, housing stability, healthcare use, and health, all of which are documented to be determinants of crime,” the authors write.

It stands to reason, Maclean said, that crimes inspired by desperation or behavioral health crises—or both—became more common in Tennessee post-2005, as poverty increased and people became more likely to delay needed health care. This was especially devastating for people who might have benefitted from mental health care or treatment for substance abuse disorder, the study found.

These patterns now risk repeating themselves at a large scale. Just last year, every state in the U.S. experienced a major contraction in Medicaid coverage, as the federal government ended an emergency pandemic policy that had kept millions enrolled in the program. States are still feeling the effects of that decision, as Bolts recently detailed. 

A number of states are contemplating further Medicaid cuts, including Kentucky, Utah, and New York. Elsewhere, in Mississippi and South Dakota, voters have tried to force elected leaders to expand Medicaid via direct democracy, but with mixed success. And on the national stage, Donald Trump is running for president again, calling for dramatic slashing of public funds for health coverage. 

Bolts spoke with Maclean about what the Tennessee study can tell us about the link between health insurance and public safety today; about what has and hasn’t changed since 2005; and about current proposed cuts to government-provided health insurance. 

“You might save some dollars in terms of Medicaid, but that may lead to some other problems with other objectives, like promoting public safety,” she warned.

There’s plenty of existing research on how people become less likely to commit crimes after gaining health coverage. Your study notes there’s been much less research into what happens when people lose coverage. Why did you find that important to examine? 

Over time, generally, Medicaid policy has led to expansion in coverage. But we’re now starting to see increasingly more talk and action about policy that could curtail it. 

Some of these losses may come as more of a surprise. (Editor’s note: People who lose Medicaid coverage due to a change in rules, or a lapse in documentation, may not find out in a timely manner or with advance warning.) If you’re gaining Medicaid, it may be that you’ve taken steps—you’ve applied for Medicaid and you’ve shown documentation, so it’s not much of a surprise. If you just suddenly lose Medicaid, that can be very destructive in and of itself, and also for the inability to plan for what you’re going to do next.

Your study found that crime increased generally in Tennessee among those who’d lost health coverage, and that the increase in nonviolent crime was particularly clear. What does that tell us?

I think our findings pointed toward a financial resources story. That is, we found stronger, more stable effects for non-violent crime, which tend to be property crimes. The property crimes we looked at are burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. The violent crimes we looked at were murder, manslaughter, rape, sexual assault, robbery, and assault. When we broke these crimes out, we see that our findings for non-violent crime were really driven by theft. 

That, to me, suggested that some of these crimes we see might be financially motivated, which might be due to the loss of resources that one experiences when Medicaid is removed, or it could be increased need to finance medical bills. 

What new information can we glean about health care and crime from looking at what happened 20 years ago in Tennessee?

The broader theme is thinking about the value of Medicaid. You can think about it as the value of the social safety net, providing support for people who don’t have much. It doesn’t just impact those people. It impacts society. 

Even if we take a very restrictive view and we say that it’s each person’s responsibility to make a go of it themselves—finding jobs, getting insurance, staying out of quote-unquote trouble—there are implications for other people. So when you think about whether or not to provide a benefit to a particular segment of the population, I think we need to see the bigger picture: we’re all connected, we all live here together, and there are implications of policies targeting a particular group for the broader society. 

We’re just focusing on crime here, but we can think about improvements in economic standing, the impact of [Medicaid] contraction on evictions. We need to look beyond just the individual, and more at society, when we’re considering the benefits of providing these social programs. 

That would be my largest piece of advice: Don’t view any particular policy in isolation, because it’s very likely, given how complicated our world is, that that policy is going to spill over into other domains.

Today, many politicians who tend to oppose expanding social services, including government-covered health benefits, also tend to support “tough on crime” policies. Why do health access and public safety so often appear in conflict?

It does seem to me that there’s a strong correlation between policymakers and politicians being tough on crime while also taking a conservative view of the role of government in the provision of health insurance. People can certainly have different views about that role of government, but I sometimes suspect there is less [of] an understanding of the potential linkages between the two.

When you give people access to Medicaid, they generally have better financial outcomes. 

You see increases in poverty when you curtail Medicaid, as was done in Tennessee. The idea is that health insurance, in addition to providing access to care, also protects people against the risk and cost of unexpected health care expenditures. You see increases in evictions as well. You can think of a whole range of outcomes that could be improved with the provision of health insurance. It seems like there are other means through which we could reduce reliance on the criminal justice system.

Just to say, alright, let’s hire some new police officers or let’s buy some new infrastructure for the police to use—it’s there, it can be seen, you can show your constituents what you’ve done. There’s something about being able to show your constituents that you did something.

Your study is timely, given the recent Medicaid contraction and the fact that several states right now are contemplating further serious cuts. New York’s governor, for instance, proposed slashing Medicaid by $1.2 billion at the same time she’s making a public show of her desire to fight crime, including by putting National Guard soldiers in Subway stations. How does your study inform these debates?

A policymaker’s job is a very hard one and I’m certainly cognizant of that, but I do think that points to an overlooked linkage: I think that as people lose access to coverage, as is going on through the unwinding, this can be quite destabilizing for individuals, and we think that could contribute to crime.

Medicaid is the largest purchaser of behavioral health care services in the country, so it plays a really important role of connecting people to services. I’m not trying to say that every crime is related to behavioral health, to substance use, because I don’t think that’s true, but I think it could be a bit short-sighted for policymakers not to consider those linkages.

The way these two things jibe together—being concerned about crime but also curtailing expenditures on a very valuable program, particularly for people with behavioral health conditions—I’d encourage people to think about what that might mean. You might save some dollars in terms of Medicaid, but that may lead to some other problems with other objectives, like promoting public safety.

Jails and prisons are often terribly unhealthy and even deadly places to be. To build off your study a bit: It seems that these so-called houses of correction and rehabilitation not only fail the people they’re holding, but—to the extent that health care access is a predictor of criminality—actively harm public safety when they release people in worse health conditions than when they arrived.

I certainly can’t disagree with that. 

At various levels, be it people who are incarcerated, people who are not incarcerated, those goals—being “tough on crime” and taking a conservative view of the role of government in the provision of health care—can very often work against one another. The social determinants of health, or just health care access, can’t be forgotten if we’re going to try to improve outcomes. And I think a lot of these very punitive approaches have unintended negative consequences.

Overdose deaths have soared since 2005. What is your view of the importance of Medicaid to treat substance use disorder and ultimately to limit the number of people dying, and to limit the criminalization of drug use?

We are looking at a time period of the mid-2000s, which was the first wave of the opioid crisis. The second wave started in roughly 2010 and transitioned more toward heroin. We’re now in a third wave, at least, of the opioid crisis, where there’s been a substantial movement to synthetic opioids like fentanyl and analogs. 

So what might that mean? Fentanyl is just substantially more harmful and easier to overdose on than prescription opioids in the 2000s, and I think that’s why we see this huge spike in opioid overdoses. At the same time, for a variety of reasons, we’re seeing more medications that can be used to treat opioid use disorder, we’re seeing what I’d say is a reduction in stigma around receiving treatment for substance use disorder. Medicaid in many states has increasingly played a larger role in providing that treatment, so my take is that, comparing the 2005 experiment to what we’re seeing now, Medicaid plays a larger role today in fighting the opioid crisis. 

I do think understanding how cutting people off Medicaid is going to affect society—especially when we have these goals of enhancing public safety being talked about in so many localities across the country—I would just hope policymakers would consider that there are some things you can’t get back. You can of course reinstate Medicaid, but the negative implications of removing it will have already occurred.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post “We Need to See the Bigger Picture”: How Cuts to Medicaid Hurt Public Safety appeared first on Bolts.

On January 29, two activists locked themselves to construction equipment belonging to the main “Cop City” contractor, shutting down the work site in downtown Atlanta for hours. “Myself and countless other residents have tried every legal avenue to Stop Cop City—but the City government has stonewalled us every step of the way,” an activist called Temperance said in a press statement. “I don’t want to have to be doing this today, but direct action and civil disobedience are the only options we have left.” Both activists were arrested and jailed.

In a way, the movement was returning to its roots. In 2021, the fight to stop Cop City began with direct action. After two years of protest, organizers extended their effort to the ballot box. Some felt it was critical to let Atlantans weigh in directly on the construction of a vast new law enforcement training center—and they were betting that the will of the people would ultimately come down on their side. On a more practical level, a referendum campaign struck Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the Cop City vote coalition, as a straightforward process with delineated steps and rules: a signature collection phase, a break while the city verified them, then on to a massive voter turnout effort. “We were like, ‘This seems very clear in terms of the path that we need to be walking on,’” she recalled. 

As it turns out, the path has been anything but clear. The Atlanta city government has thrown up barriers at every turn, miring the petition gathering and signature approval process in bureaucratic and legal delays. The city has even drawn the ire of mainstream Democratic politicians and voting rights groups in its attempts to deploy classic forms of voter restriction. 

These roadblocks were made possible by the fact that the organizers are essentially starting from zero. Atlanta has never hosted a citizen-led referendum before, and therefore has few established structures in place to govern the process. “So much of what happened over the course of the past two years was entirely preventable, had we had a codified process that allowed everyone to know what the rules of the game were,” said Rohit Malhotra, the founder and executive director of Atlanta’s Center for Civic Innovation.

Since last September, Malhotra and others have sought to address this conundrum by drafting local legislation that would clarify the referendum process, now and for the future. That, too, has been met with interference from the mayor’s office. On Monday, the Atlanta city council finally passed legislation codifying rules and regulations for a referendum. But not before an 11th hour substitution that reintroduced signature matching, a form of verification that national voting rights groups have decried as burdensome and discriminatory. “Our ask was simple—we just wanted you to protect democracy.” Malhotra said during public comment this week. “This body has continued to break its word and to break our hearts.”

Now, as the Stop Cop City movement continues to wait for a federal appeals court to hand down a decision about the legality of the petition gathering process, there are still 16 boxes of five month-old signatures sitting untouched in City Hall. But, amidst this uncertainty, external deadlines are fast approaching. The referendum was originally supposed to appear on last November’s ballot, and it’s already too late for this year’s March presidential primary election, too. Organizers are now debating whether to aim for the ballot in May, when local primaries happen, or wait until November, when the presidential election might force Democrats nationally to weigh in on the fight, given Georgia’s battleground status. If the decision comes late enough, and city officials keep stalling, the choice may be made for them.

“If the city of Atlanta was really invested in elevating the voices of its residents, they would at least be ready,” said Analilia Mejia, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, a national network of 50 organizations, three of which are local to Atlanta, that is supporting the referendum effort “They wouldn’t be running a clock.” 

From the beginning, Cop City has revealed the fault lines present in Atlanta’s system of representative democracy. Organizers started talking about the possibility of a popular referendum as early as September 2021. That was the month the city council first decided, over strenuous public opposition, to turn hundreds of acres of land in Atlanta’s South River Forest over to the Atlanta Police Foundation, which planned to build a massive training center for law enforcement and first responders—replete with a mock city to practice quelling street protests, an explosives test site, and multiple gun ranges. “By September (2021) it is clear that there’s organized money and organized special interests pushing this,” said Mejia. “It then becomes clear to us that we need organized people and some organized money to counter it.”

After almost two years of protest, the push to bring Cop City to a public vote came to fruition. In June 2023, in an echo of the 2021 meeting, the council voted to allocate tens of millions in public funds toward the training center—again, after hours of public comment, most of it against the measure. The coalition announced the referendum campaign the following day. 

Atlanta’s city charter gave Stop Cop City organizers 60 days to collect more than 58,000 signatures from city voters in order to get on the November ballot, a challenge in itself. But, almost immediately, the city started to stonewall. The city clerk delayed the beginning of the petition process by quibbling over the petition’s formatting, and in August, city officials announced that Atlanta would implement “signature matching”—the process of comparing a person’s signature on the petition to the one on file for them in state voter records. 

Signature matching has been used in many states for other voting practices, like authenticating absentee ballots. But it is widely considered to be an unnecessarily onerous form of verification that disproportionately excludes votes from people of color, English language learners, and the elderly and disabled. Atlanta’s decision to implement signature matching drew wide condemnation, including from Democratic leaders like Senator Raphael Warnock and voting rights groups founded by former gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams.

The city has also fought organizers on who can collect signatures. After residents in unincorporated areas of Dekalb County sued the city—arguing they were unfairly excluded from the petition drive despite living near the proposed training center site—a federal judge ruled in their favor. The judge’s order immediately expanded residency requirements for canvassers and restarted the 60-day timeline to gather signatures. The coalition says it delivered some 116,000 signatures in September (nearly double what they need to get on the ballot), but the city appealed and has refused to tally them and move forward with the referendum process until a federal appeals court issues its opinion. 

As they wait for the court’s decision, Stop Cop City Vote organizers have found themselves in limbo. “There’s a lot that I want to do and would like to be doing versus going back and forth with the city with something that should be so simple,” said Hooks. “We’re here for the long game struggle,” she went on, but acknowledged that the delays have taken a toll on some: “I know it’s been very disappointing and demoralizing in a lot of ways.” 

One antidote to this frustration was to start work on the proposal to codify a referendum procedure—a parallel track that doesn’t affect the court’s decision, but would jumpstart the process if the court rules in the organizers’ favor. 

The draft ordinance, crafted with the help of national voting rights lawyer Marc Elias and first introduced by Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari in January, laid out procedures for reviewing the referendum petitions. Crucially, it aimed to preclude signature matching, which Malhotra called “non-negotiable.” Instead, the ordinance proposed a “curing” process to resolve inconsistencies, like the accidental omission of a middle name, that can trigger a signature invalidation.

But on Monday, two council members—including one who represents the affluent Buckhead neighborhood, which has in the past sought to secede from the rest of Atlanta and where many residents firmly support the construction of Cop City—forced language into the legislation that outlines a process for a version of signature matching. After Malhotra spoke for 10 minutes, imploring the city council to amend the legislation to remove signature matching, the body approved the ordinance anyway by a 10-5 vote. By then, the legislation had changed so much that Bakhtiari voted against it. 

Chaos ensued, with organizers, including Mary Hooks, occupying the dais to protest the last-minute change. “We see continuously the city betraying everyday people and our right to vote on issues that matter to us,” she told the room.

A federal appeals court ruling in the city’s favor could derail the referendum process even further. The city could argue that since the lower court’s earlier decision expanding the timeframe for people to collect signatures was overturned, the circumstances of their collection are now simply invalid—though Malhotra says such a decision would make the city look even worse. “I don’t think the mayor or the council, or the city in general, benefits from winning on a technicality,” Malhotra said. “For them to be like: ‘Well, I know we have these hundred and whatever thousand signatures but now we’re going to burn them’—I think that that’s just a politically silly thing for them to do.”
“But I don’t hold it beyond them,” he added. 

If the court rules in favor of the coalition, an entirely new scramble will ensue. Per its charter, the city has 50 days to stand up a referendum process. That’s where the new ordinance comes in. With more than 100,000 signatures collected, coalition members say they’re confident that they will cross the threshold even if some signatures are thrown out. But the verification process could still present issues. An analysis by the Associated Press and several local news outlets found a high number of seemingly invalid signatures. If the petition is approved despite these challenges, the question will then be whether to vote on it in May or November.

Many onlookers have struggled to understand why the city has invested so much energy and risked so much bad press in continuing to block a vote. “I cannot understand how the home of King and Lewis has the audacity to fight basic democratic process for any other reason than they are scared to lose,” said Malhotra. “From day one, this has been a process and procedure failure—and rather than addressing that underlying challenge, I think they underestimated the public’s appetite for transparency on process and procedure, and overestimated and overplayed their hand on trying to turn this into a binary conversation about policing and public safety.”

While legislation codifying a referendum process has passed, albeit with signature-matching included, there’s still no telling when the federal appeals court decision may come. In the meantime, there will be more direct actions. “Folks have said, like, ‘Hey, while we’re waiting and the referendum’s in limbo, and we still gonna give our elected officials the smoke—these corporations are also not going to be let off the hook,’” Hooks said. “We’re not going to lay the direct action component of this fight down just because the state repression is coming.” 

Sixty-one Cop City activists have been indicted for violating Georgia’s RICO act, and some 42 of them also have pending domestic terrorism charges. This week, state and federal law enforcement officers raided several Cop City opponents’ homes, taking at least two people into custody and reportedly refusing to show arrest warrants. 

On February 6, the Georgia state legislature passed a bill mandating cash bail for offenses like racketeering, domestic terrorism, criminal trespass, and “unlawful assembly.” It would also drastically limit bail funds’ ability to bond out protestors like Hooks and others who affixed themselves to construction vehicles on January 29. “On Monday when I left home,” Hooks recalled, “my wife was like, ‘Please come back. Please come back.’”

The post Faced with ‘Cop City’ Referendum Push, Atlanta Changes Up Its Election Rules appeared first on Bolts.

It had been a year since a federal judge ordered the city of Chicago to overhaul its police department. The requirement was to address discriminatory policing and misconduct that had decimated public faith in law enforcement, and progress was slow. But in summer 2020, the recently appointed Superintendent David Brown announced a new direction in public safety that promised to strengthen the bond between police and the communities they serve.

At the core of this community-centric policing strategy was a newly minted unit, the Community Safety Team. Brown said their mission would be getting to know neighbors, partnering with local churches, block clubs and businesses, and empowering residents to guide law enforcement’s crime priorities and solutions to neighborhood safety issues.

“The only way to create safer communities is one neighborhood at a time,” Brown said at the July 2020 announcement of the new team. 

But rather than police encounters aimed at building community trust, data show the Community Safety Team, which quickly grew to over 800 officers in less than a year, focused instead on interactions known to harm community relations: hundreds of thousands of traffic stops. 

The Community Safety Team was responsible for nearly a third of all traffic stops citywide by 2021, more than any other police team. Community Safety officers overwhelmingly stopped drivers in Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, contributing to massive racial disparities in traffic enforcement, data show.

Police accountability watchdogs say the Community Safety Team’s conduct reveals a pattern of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) hiding aggressive tactics beneath a veneer of community policing. In the past, CPD’s most aggressive units made heavy use of stop-and-frisk encounters to search people for drugs and weapons. But since a 2015 lawsuit led to major reforms of the practice, CPD replaced stop-and-frisk with stopping exponentially more motorists.

Now, despite a new progressive mayor’s outspoken stances against such notoriously harmful policing practices, and a newly confirmed police superintendent signaling a decisive shift in public safety strategy, many doubt whether the department can course-correct to an earnest community policing model. 

“The city has a horrific history of these roving, violent citywide teams…that racially profile people and terrorize and physically brutalize people,” said Alexandra Block, Director of Criminal Legal Systems and Policing Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “The Community Safety Team is just an outcrop of that pattern.”

When drivers believe they are stopped and searched by police without reason, the feeling of harassment only deepens the divide between police and the communities they patrol, said Joseph Williams, member of the Englewood Police District Council, one of the civilian oversight bodies recently created to enhance community partnership and accountability. 

“There’s no way you can do community policing while you’re doing all those stops,” Williams said. “You make them feel like less than a human being. They leave feeling worthless, like they’ve been targeted. I know what I felt like when I went through that.”

When Williams, 34, was pulled over most recently in July, the stop was relatively uneventful, and officers let him go without a search. But each of the countless traffic stops he endured still reminds him of a traumatic incident when he and a group of friends were pulled over as teens.

As the officers searched the group without their consent looking for illegal guns, they violated and humiliated the teenagers, Williams said.

“I’ll never forget them pulling me and my friends right out of the car and searching us,” Williams said. “They reached down into my private parts, went into our boxers, and they didn’t find anything. …We were young and glad we were let go, but ultimately that was a traumatic experience.”

The Community Safety Team

As the department poured resources into the Community Safety Team, Brown pledged their work would be driven by long-term relationships with residents, businesses, religious organizations and neighborhood groups.

By the end of 2020, the Community Safety Teams logged over 200 of those community interactions, according to a Bolts analysis of data from the Office of Emergency Management and Communications’ dispatch system, which generates a unique record each time officers radio headquarters to document civilian interactions or routine activities. Those community interactions included food drives, youth sports events and community input meetings, according to a Chicago police spokesperson. 

But those interactions were dwarfed by the 48,000 traffic stops the team conducted in 2020—nearly all of that unit’s documented activity that year. In 2021, when the Community Safety Team was at its largest, its officers logged over 150,000 traffic stops—more than twice the number of community engagement activities, the data show.

Although the Community Safety Team was called a “first-of-its-kind approach designed for officers to get to know the people and places within each of the unique neighborhoods," Brown’s promises were reminiscent of a different community policing initiative launched in the 1990s, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or CAPS.

The CAPS approach was a hyper-local, bottom-up strategy that hinged on residents working with officers to identify both the issues in the community as well as potential solutions. The strategy worked to increase trust in police because the same officers had a consistent beat in a particular geographic area where residents could get to know them personally and officers could get familiar with the safety challenges in a small area, proponents said. 

In the Englewood neighborhood on the city’s south side, CAPS officers have helped by listening to people’s priorities and focusing on problem-solving rather than numbers, Williams said. For instance, when a group of abandoned cars on a city-owned vacant lot became a magnet for drug dealing and other crime, Williams told the local CAPS team that it was a serious problem for neighbors. Officers then quickly dealt with the issue, he said.

"They ticketed those cars and got them towed. The community's been trying to get that done for a year almost," Williams said. "Our CAPS department is phenomenal."

But the Community Safety Team turned out to be a somewhat opposite approach: rather than officers building relationships in consistent beats, it was a roving citywide unit with no direct ties to specific neighborhoods. And they employed the same tactics as the notorious strike forces and saturation teams— squads of officers used to flood areas with police activity.

The legal backlash

After Chicago police shifted away from widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics in 2015 following an ACLU Illinois lawsuit over the practice, the number of traffic stops conducted across the entire department soared. Between 2015 and 2023, officers made over 4.5 million traffic stops, mostly in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, CPD data show. Nearly 900,000 of these stops were made in 2019 alone, and by then the Illinois chapter of the ACLU had again raised the alarm that the stops may be violating drivers’ civil rights. 

This work culminated in a class action lawsuit filed in June 2023 against the city on behalf of Chicagoans claiming the traffic stop strategy routinely violated the rights of Black and Latinx drivers. It singled out the Community Safety Team for the tremendous volume of traffic stops it conducted, amounting to what the suit called Chicago Police's "mass traffic stop program."

The lawsuit claims this program relies on illegal quotas, and flooding Black and Latinx neighborhoods with police encounters to deter unrelated crime, using the pretext of traffic enforcement to search drivers for contraband—often without their consent. This racial profiling of drivers of color resulted in police "harassing hundreds of thousands of Black Chicagoans" annually, Block said. 

Twenty-five-year-old West Side resident Mahari Bell joined the lawsuit after being stopped over 10 times in the past eight years. While some of the stops seemed harmless, others left him fearing for his life, Bell said.

"A lot of us are just tired. People don't want to be harassed by Chicago police," Bell said. "I was profiled, harassed, my rights are violated consistently. Nobody wants to live like that, especially in the city that they're from."

While driving for UberEats in May 2022, Bell was pulled over downtown when officers accused him of cutting off another driver—a claim he contests. Just moments into the encounter, officers put Bell in handcuffs without any explanation. When they asked to search his car, Bell felt like he had no choice but to agree.

"It all happened so quick. There wasn't any need for a search or for handcuffs. The officer, he was very accusatory, so it was clear that it wasn't about traffic," Bell said. "I feel like if I would have said no, the stop could have been completely different. I could've spent the night in a holding cell."

But even when police encounters don’t escalate, being constantly pulled over makes Bell feel "belittled, degraded and ultimately disrespected," he said.

"It made me realize, I think a lot of officers in Chicago just don't care to be a part of the community. They don't care to offer their public service," Bell said. "Despite my intentions, despite who I am, I'm still just a statistic to CPD. Just another traffic stop that has to be done for their numbers."

The lawsuit is still in early stages, but its goal is to end citywide units dedicated to traffic stops so Chicago Police can reel in the harm to community trust inflicted by the Community Safety Team and affiliated units, Block said.

"We are hoping CPD will rethink its reliance on the mass traffic stops strategy as its go-to supposed crime fighting technique, because it just doesn't work," Block said.

The ACLU's class action lawsuit builds upon an existing complaint about the Community Safety Team that came from within the unit itself. In 2021, Franklin Paz, a former lieutenant on the Community Safety Team sued the city over illegal traffic stop quotas. Paz, who was also a 20-year department veteran, claims he was demoted and punished for resisting the quotas. 

Police sergeants on the Community Safety Team testified that when they were assigned to the unit, leadership told them their primary mission was to stop masses of drivers and proactively initiate police encounters, court records show. Officers were required to meet stop quotas unrelated to crime levels or traffic safety, according to Paz, who was instructed to demand that each officer in his platoon conduct at least 10 traffic stops daily, the complaint shows.

The ACLU lawsuit references emails where CPD’s then second-in-command, Deputy Superintendent Ernest Cato, urges commanders to raise traffic enforcement numbers and "utilize traffic stops to address violence."

The lawsuits share common claims that the Community Safety Team was simply a rebrand and reshuffling of CPD's infamously aggressive saturation teams.

Though Brown promised at the launch of the Community Safety Team that "this is not a roving strike force like what CPD had in the past," officers testified that unit was staffed with personnel from tactical teams, gun teams, saturation teams, and other groups trained to aggressively stop residents, often while patrolling in plainclothes and in unmarked cars. 

Bolts’ analysis of CPD attendance and assignment data supports this, showing that at least 45 of the sergeants leading the Community Safety Team in its first year were assigned to the community policing initiative immediately after leaving tactical teams.

A new administration, a new era for policing?

Amid the legal backlash, CPD quietly sunsetted the Community Safety Team by reassigning officers to other units en masse by the start of 2023, leaving fewer than a hundred officers on the team. After becoming police superintendent in September, Larry Snelling said during a police budget hearing that he has since “broken that team down” and reassigned the officers back to local districts. 

But even as the Community Safety Team waned, the unit’s aggressive traffic stop tactics continued to be enforced by other officers, including those assigned to neighborhood districts where Snelling emphasized he would focus police resources, data show. The most recent dispatch data show the units stopping the largest numbers of drivers are now those assigned to local districts, including beat officers, tactical teams, and rapid response officers.

Snelling is one of the first major appointees of Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer who ran and won on a historically progressive platform, and has promised to chart a new course for public safety centered on community investment, not solely law enforcement power. Since taking office, Johnson has had to balance expectations from the progressives who put him in power with those of the police union which has been antagonistic from the start. One of Johnson’s first acts as mayor established an Office of Community Safety, charged with “dual responsibilities of leading a full force of government, rapid response to safety issues and developing community-driven strategies for addressing the root causes of harm,” a spokesperson for the mayor told Bolts. 

With a progressive mayor at the helm, mounting pressure from newly created civilian oversight councils, and the weight of the consent decree bearing down, the pressure is also on Snelling to set policing policy that can move the dial on community safety without sacrificing public trust in law enforcement.

Historically, incoming CPD leadership inevitably launches a signature crimefighting initiative, like Brown’s Community Safety Team or former Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s use of the CompStat strategy that resembled broken-windows policing. And Snelling will likely follow the example of his predecessors with a signature community policing initiative, said CPD expert Wes Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University.

"My guess is Larry Snelling will invent a new acronym with a promise of a reinvigorated community policing program," Skogan said. 

But like the exchange of officers between tactical teams and the Community Safety Team, a new name doesn’t guarantee any fundamental change in how residents are impacted by the policing tactics. 

Unless new leadership focuses on safety "outcomes" like crime reduction rather than "inputs" like traffic stop numbers, the aggressive policing tactics will likely continue, said former interim Superintendent Charlie Beck, who in 2020 dramatically restructured the department by shifting officers out of citywide units and into neighborhood police districts. 

"You get what you ask for. If you emphasize traffic stops as what you want, then you'll get them. Unfortunately, if you cast too wide a net when you do that, you can make people feel like they're under siege,” Beck said.

There is also broader skepticism over whether Johnson’s administration can effectively steer the department away from the domineering policing tactics that have landed the city in hot water time and again. Johnson has faced continued pressure over his increase of the police budget, his administration’s contract agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police that doubles annual pay raises and may weaken accountability processes for disciplinary cases, and his continued funding of the ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology despite prior vows to drop the controversial surveillance system. 

But Johnson’s budget does offer a preview into the community investments aimed at tackling the root causes of crime, with $209 million going towards efforts like anti-violence programming, restorative justice, re-entry programs and gender-based violence prevention and intervention, a spokesman for the mayor said. The plan vastly expands staffing for public mental health clinics and mobile crisis response teams, which include social workers and addiction specialists who would respond to 911 calls in lieu of police during mental health emergencies. Johnson’s budget would also expand the city’s youth job programs, and includes investments to address the housing and homelessness crisis brought to the forefront by the influx of asylum seekers. 

Johnson and Snelling have both touted plans to replace up to 400 officer roles with civilian positions, such as domestic violence advocates and workers assigned to the officer training academy. 

“Having those civilian employees amongst us, it creates a better environment for the officers,” Snelling said. “It’s officers working with civilians, so we have a better understanding of the community and the community has a better understanding of us. It shows we can work in partnership with people who are not sworn members.”

Community policing

In spite of the Community Safety Team, some prior community policing efforts have forged strong connections between residents and officers, leaving some hopeful for the future. Snelling’s earlier efforts at building connections with Englewood residents made Williams optimistic about future community policing efforts, he said. 

"He brought his tactical officers out—the ones who do a lot of the crazy stuff sometimes—he brought them out so they could get to know the community in a different way,” Williams said. “He's coming in, he's walking those streets, trying to build the relationships.”

A 2019 community policing project, the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative (NPI), emulates CAPS by dedicating a group of officers in each district to build long-term relationships with residents and neighborhood groups and coordinate city resources to solve problems in the area. Unlike the Community Safety Team, these officers don’t do the typical emergency responses, traffic stops, and patrols. 

The program has "reimagined what police officers can do," said Deondre' Rutues, a council member for the 15th Police District in Austin, as well as the Community Engagement Specialist for the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative.

"We're supposed to lead the charge and tell them what we need from them," Rutues said. "It isn't a process where police just come and lock somebody up. The officers follow the lead of the community to determine what to do."

Changing police leadership, staffing shortages and the interruption of the coronavirus pandemic halted the NPI from being fully implemented, a Northwestern report found. But the success of the NPI shows that one arm of the city's agenda may be dedicated to an earnest attempt at community policing. 

But as long as the other arm is focused on mass traffic stops conducted by roving strike teams, Chicago's community policing agenda will be at odds with itself, says Rutues.

"You created the Community Safety Team to enhance relationship building...But it continues to undo everything that is supposed to be contained in the Consent Decree, and also the work people on the ground are trying to do." 

The post “I’m Just Another Traffic Stop” appeared first on Bolts.

Whitmire, a fixture of Democratic politics in Texas and state lawmaker for half a century, has made the story central to his campaign for mayor of Houston this year, weaving it between calls to jail more people, aggressively hire more police, and deploy hundreds of state troopers to patrol the city. “When I watch the crime that’s in Houston, it alarms me,” he said in a recent campaign ad where he talks about the robbery three decades ago. “You know, I was robbed at gunpoint in my garage, and I definitely thought he was going to kill me, my wife and my 9 year old daughter. And it just changes your life forever.”

Whitmire finished on top of a crowded field of 17 other candidates in the Nov. 7 election, winning 42.5 percent of the vote. He now faces a Dec. 9 runoff against Sheila Jackson Lee, the longest serving member of Houston’s congressional delegation and another towering figure in Democratic politics in the state, who came in second last week with 35.6 percent.

The mayor’s race has spotlighted the tough-on-crime politics that still dominate debate around public safety in the nation’s fourth largest city. Police in Houston have a long history of brutality and impunity, while Harris County, where the city is located, was until recently known as the death penalty capital of the world for how many people it has sent away for execution. 

In recent years, local debates and policies around criminal punishment started to shift as Democrats solidified control of the county government and as activists pushed for reforms. Throughout the two terms of Mayor Sylvester Turner, who could not run for reelection this year due to term limits, advocates lobbied him to implement police reforms, with mixed results: Turner updated policies to increase access to officer body camera footage and promised greater police oversight but he also balked at other requests. He resisted demands that the city make its contract negotiations with the Houston police union, which determine many oversight and discipline policies, a public process, as it is in other major Texas cities like San Antonio and Austin.

Heading into the city’s municipal elections this fall, advocates for police reform tried to turn the mayoral race into an opportunity for broader discussion around public safety and changes they want the city’s next mayor to prioritize. Under Houston’s “strong mayor” form of government, the mayor wields enormous power over city policy by appointing each department head, overseeing all administrative work, and setting the city council’s agenda. 

A coalition of community and civil rights groups, which called themselves RISE Houston (or “Reimagining Safety for Everyone in Houston”), developed three demands for candidates: reducing minor traffic stops that disproportionately target Black drivers, ending a controversial multi million dollar police surveillance contract that has proven ineffective, and freezing the city’s police budget. 

But when the coalition tried surveying each candidate on those issues, few responded or took any concrete positions. Neither Whitmire or Jackson Lee, the political juggernauts in the race, even attended a forum on public safety policies that the coalition held in early October—although Jackson Lee, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, spoke to the crowd virtually later in the event. 

RoShawn C. Evans, one of the activists who helped form the coalition, said the local criminal justice reform group that he co-founded in 2015, Pure Justice, had considered making endorsements for the first time this year but eventually decided against it.

“We chose not to because of the narrative around public safety,” Evans told Bolts. “It’s very bothersome that I’m watching all these candidates run to represent the city of Houston and the platform that they’re running on is a platform that is around the narrative of mass incarceration. Every dollar we put into law enforcement, every dollar we put into building a new court or hiring more DAs, it opens the floodgates to mass incarceration even wider than what it already is.” 

Whitmire, who has led in both polling and campaign funding throughout the race, helped set the terms of debate during the race with his promise to be “tough and smart on crime.” Like in cities across the country, violent crime rose in Texas’ largest city during the pandemic and remained a top concern for Houstonians surveyed before this year’s election, even as crime rates have started to fall. 

Whitmire is a rare Democrat with any semblance of power in the GOP-dominated Texas legislature. As chair of the Senate’s criminal justice committee since 1993, a position he has retained since the Republican Party solidified control of the chamber later in the 1990s, he has sat at the center of the state’s policies around criminal punishment for decades. In the 1990s, Whitmire was an architect of policies that scaled up incarceration in Texas, helping pass a legislative package that increased prison time for serious offenses and pumping $1 billion into an unprecedented prison-building boom. Later, in the 2000s, he helped expand diversion programs that reversed the trend and staved off even more prison building. 

In more recent legislative sessions, advocates have criticized Whitmire for being a barrier to change, saying the senate criminal justice committee has become a killing field for reform legislation under his leadership. He has refused to consider reforms the Texas House has passed, such as legislation raising the age of criminal responsibility to 18 (Texas is one of only three states that charges 17 year olds as adults) and efforts to install air conditioning in the state’s dangerously hot prisons. Even reforms he claims to support, like “second chance” legislation to allow reconsideration for people sentenced to life in prison as children, have derailed in the committee on his watch. 

Whitmire, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, has defended his legislative record and insisted reform advocates have unrealistic expectations, telling the Houston Chronicle recently, “I don’t think any criticism has an appreciation for the difficulty in Austin of doing criminal justice reform at any time in the 30 years that I’ve been chair.” 

Civil rights advocates in Houston are particularly worried about one of Whitmire’s core campaign proposals, to bring in more state troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to help patrol the city, warning that it will worsen racial disparities in policing in Houston. The actions of the state agency, which is far whiter and less diverse than Houston’s police force, have raised concerns about racial profiling and police brutality when troopers have been deployed to patrol other cities and along the border with Mexico. 

When Austin city leaders tried the approach earlier this year, troopers primarily arrested people of color before officials called off the partnership. When Dallas brought in DPS troopers in 2019, some local leaders criticized the agency for acting like “an occupying force.” Christopher Rivera, an outreach coordinator in Houston for the Texas Civil Rights Project’s criminal injustice program, pointed to a report the group put out earlier this year showing minor traffic enforcement already disproportionately targets Black drivers in Houston. While activists have asked for an ordinance limiting traffic stops and police encounters for non-moving violations, like expired registration, they now worry Whitmire’s proposal for DPS patrols could exacerbate the problem. 

“Probably the most concerning thing that has come up in the race has been the DPS issue,” Rivera told Bolts. “When we bring more police into the city of Houston, they just end up over policing more neighborhoods of color and low income communities.”

Rivera said local activists hope that a change to municipal government that voters adopted last week will open the door to more reform discussions at city hall, regardless of who’s in the mayor’s office. More than 80 percent of voters approved Proposition A, which gives city council members more power to force the council to take up issues even without the mayor’s approval; beginning next year, any three of Houston’s 16 city council members can join together to put items on the council’s agenda.

Progressive advocates in Houston are hopeful that they’ve retained some footholds in municipal government in this fall’s elections. Council Member Tarsha Jackson, who was formerly a top staffer with the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which has become a driving force in left politics in the state, won reelection last week. Council Member Letitia Plummer, who has advocated for changing how the city spends money on public safety, faces a runoff against challenger Roy Morales.

While Whitmire has the backing of local and state police groups in his run for mayor, Jackson Lee has garnered endorsements by more outwardly progressive organizations and leaders, like TOP and also Lina Hidalgo, Harris County government’s chief executive, who has supported bail reform and pushed back against some of the district attorney’s funding requests. While Jackson Lee has used a different tone from Whitmire when talking about crime, she has done little to carve out a competing vision around public safety and has offered few specific policy priorities on the campaign trail. 

Jackson Lee, who did not respond to questions for this story, expressed some caution about Whitmire’s plan to deploy state troopers during one of the final televised debates in the race last month. 

“I give them credit for their investigative skills, they will be used for that, but not patrolling our neighborhoods where our families are looking to those they know and those who know them,” she said, promising instead to “expand” the presence of local police.

On election night, Jackson Lee thanked her supporters and spoke in broad terms about combating gun violence, increasing mental health services, and “making sure that every corner of this city will be represented at the table of empowerment.” Across town, as he addressed his supporters, Whitmire again returned to his own brush with crime three decades ago. 

“Let anyone who can hear my voice: I don’t apologize for being tough on crime,” he said. “I’ve had to beg for my life and my wife and my nine year old daughter in our garage. That person put a gun in my face and I thought I was finished. I was worried about my daughter and my wife. But God had a plan for me.”

Correction (Nov. 17): An earlier version of this article misstated the result for one of Houston’s council seats; Letitia Plummer and Roy Morales will face off in a runoff.

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Though it has been significantly overshadowed by French president Emanuel Macron’s controversial attempt to raise the retirement age, the legislation was passed in anticipation of the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics, for which the city expects to receive over 9 million visitors from outside the city. The law will allow artificial intelligence programs to sift through video footage collected from public security cameras placed throughout the city, in order to analyze people’s movements in real time and detect suspicious or abnormal behavior.

“That could be, for example, detecting someone running, someone who isn’t moving, who’s static in public space, a face that’s covered up, someone doing graffiti—a lot of different things,” said Alouette, pseudonym for an activist with a French digital rights group that opposes the new law, La Quadrature du Net, and who didn’t want to be named due to privacy concerns.

The law has provoked an outcry from a number of privacy activists, civil society organizations, members of the European Parliament, and lawmakers from France’s left-wing political coalition Nupes. These groups claim that it vastly expands police power, invades individual privacy and civil liberties, and paves the way for further incursions. “We have a lot of evidence that these technologies cause a lot of harm, they lead to misidentification of people and wrongful arrest,” said Mher Hakobyan, Amnesty International’s Advocacy Advisor on AI Regulation. “We have very little evidence that these technologies actually do what authorities say.” 

Organizers in Los Angeles are paying close attention to the developments in Paris, with an eye to what might happen in Los Angeles when the city hosts the 2028 games.

“This kind of surveillance technology is part and parcel of hosting the Olympic Games,” said Eric Sheehan of the group NOlympics LA. “In Tokyo, they tried to pass for years this anti terrorism law and failed because people were not down. As soon as they had the Olympics approved, they passed that law using the Olympics state of exception as their reasoning.”

These concerns around automated video surveillance are the latest in a long list of reasons why NOlympics LA and French counterparts such as Non aux JO 2024 à Paris and Saccage 2024 object to the games. While the massive international events are typically celebrated as an economic boon for host cities, they also come with extraordinary human—and, often, financial—costs, and can give politicians cover to implement policies whose effects will reverberate long after the games end. Local governments around the world are becoming increasingly wary of the impact of the Olympics, with Paris winning the chance to host in 2024 after a number of other major cities withdrew their bids. 

The French government claims that the law does not allow for the collection of biometric data, information about the physical characteristics of individual humans such as fingerprints or DNA, which Alouette, Hakobyan, and others dismiss as semantics. “They say, ‘It doesn’t allow you to identify someone,’” Alouette told Bolts. In fact, she said, AI video surveillance “can automatically recognize someone because of their physical characteristics,” that the only real difference between the recently approved technology and facial recognition is that the algorithm is focused on the body rather than the face. “To us, it is biometric technology,” she said. 

While advocates of AI surveillance technology argue that it is necessary to increase security at major sporting events—a French National Assembly member who belongs to Renaissance, Macron’s party, argued that it could have helped prevent the deadly 2016 terrorist attack in Nice—skeptics worry that it will only serve to amplify the pre-existing biases of law enforcement. Alouette says this newly legalized surveillance would come down hardest on people who spend the most time in public space, who tend to be the poorest members of society—beggars, homeless people, or migrants selling their wares in the street. 

The 2024 Olympic village will be built in Saint-Denis, a working-class area just to the north of Paris that is home to Black and Muslim immigrant populations already subject to heightened scrutiny and aggressive intervention by the French police.

“This technology is being used in a context which is already very hostile to people from certain communities or backgrounds,” said Hakobyan. “How you determine what is abnormal or problematic behavior is, of course, very ingrained and embedded in racist presumptions, but also ableist—because if a person with a certain psychosocial disability can behave in a way which from a normative point of view can be viewed as aggressive.” AI has evinced extraordinarily high rates of misidentification of people of color, for example, in some cases leading to wrongful arrests—something that was already happening long before the existence of AI technology.

“It allows [police] to hide behind an algorithm,” said Alouette, but “an algorithm learns according to the data you feed it.”

As written, Article 7, which contains the law’s video surveillance provisions, is an “experimental” measure that will expire by the end of December 2024, but two lawmakers recently issued a report recommending the use of AI video surveillance be extended beyond the timeframe of the Olympics and add in real-time facial recognition as well—which could be voted on as early as September 2023. 

All of this comes as the European Parliament attempts to significantly restrict the use of algorithmic surveillance technologies via its AI act, which represents the first global attempt to comprehensively regulate the use of artificial intelligence. European law supersedes that of its member states, meaning that France would be out of compliance with regional standards if the AI act passes. But “France is one of the most influential member states in the EU. It has a lot of say in how the act is being developed,” said Hakobyan, noting that France has also used its influence on the European Council, one of the union’s executive bodies, in “trying to water down provisions in the act, so it doesn’t go against what they’re doing nationally.” (The act will become law once the Council and the European Parliament finalize their respective stances on the act and agree on a compromise, which is expected to happen before the end of the year.)

Sheehan of NOlympics LA sees many similarities between the new French law and plans already underway for the 2028 games in Los Angeles. “The LA ‘28 Organizing Committee is excited to announce that they’re going to be using facial recognition for all tickets to the games—meanwhile, French politicians are trying to try to sneak it through,” he told Bolts. 

He also noted that a contingent of LA2028 Olympic Planning Committee officials and LAPD officers, including police chief Michel Moore, had in 2021 traveled to France to discuss both countries’ security preparations for the games with their French equivalents. “The way that it’s policed in every large city around the world is very similar,” he said. 

Sheehan, like many skeptics of the LA 2028 Olympics, foresees a repeat of the 1984 Los Angeles games, which led the LAPD to crack down on street homelessness and rapidly accelerated police militarization in the years after. “In Los Angeles, we’re already seeing evictions, we’re already seeing people being removed—literally for Olympic hotels,” he said. 

Meanwhile, while much of the debate over the law in France has centered on Article 7, Natsuko Sasaki with the anti-Olympics group Saccage 2024 says that there are other concerning aspects as well. Article 12, for example, imposes a 7,500 euro penalty and six months in jail against anyone who enters Olympic premises without a ticket, a move that has been interpreted as an attempt to quell political demonstrations. It could build on existing French laws that are already being used to crack down on public protests against Macron’s recent increase in retirement age and cost of living hikes. “It criminalizes the actions of militants…If we do something at the stadium,” she said. “And so we can’t. We can’t allow ourselves to pay this sort of fine.” 

“Our collective says that we want to cancel the games. That’s the official line. But I’m Japanese and I saw that even Covid didn’t cancel the Olympics,” she said, referencing the 2020 Tokyo games, which were postponed until 2021, then ultimately held without spectators because of the pandemic. For Sasaki, the fight against the Olympics is a marathon, not a sprint. Though Tokyo went ahead, it so soured the Japanese public on the games that the mayor of Sapporo, which had applied to host the 2030 games, recently announced that the city would delay its bid to host. “For us, after Paris, it’s finished,” she said, “but the Olympics continue.”

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