Feds to probe Trenton police for ‘problematic’ use of force and illegal stops

BY: Dana Difilippo 

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a civil rights investigation into Trenton and its police department, citing concerns that officers use excessive force and routinely, illegally stop and search pedestrians and motorists without reason or warrants.

Investigators will probe “problematic” uses of force against people stopped for minor traffic offenses and those who were cooperating or already restrained, said Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the department’s civil rights division.

They’ll also investigate allegations that officers have used force to punish people observing or questioning their actions and that officers have escalated tensions with residents, injuring people in mental health crises, Clarke said in announcing the probe Tuesday.

“These allegations are serious and credible, and our investigation will seek to establish whether these allegations are true,” Clarke said. “Effective policing requires public trust. When law enforcement officers violate the Constitution and federal law, it erodes trust and undermines public safety efforts.”

U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said investigators will try to determine if the department has an unconstitutional, systemic “pattern or practice” of police misbehavior. The investigation is expected to take up to a year. A similar probe against Newark police a decade ago resulted in a 2014 consent decree that required the department to adopt reforms.

Investigators haven’t gotten specific reports of racial profiling, but 49% of the 7-square-mile capital city’s 90,000 residents are Black, while 37% are Hispanic or Latino, census figures show.

“We do not allege racial discrimination here. We are going to follow the facts and the law. We are aware, of course, that there is a sizable population of people of color within Trenton,” Clarke said.

Investigators will review use-of-force reports, court records, news media reports of police brutality and misconduct, officers’ body camera footage, officer training materials, and policies on how the department investigates citizen complaints and disciplines officers, Clarke said. They’ll also meet with police staff, observe officers on duty, and meet with the public, she added.

“As we begin this investigation, we recognize the challenges that Trenton and the Trenton Police Department face in addressing violent crime,” Clarke said. “But meeting these challenges requires confidence by the public that the police are committed to protecting them. It requires the assurance that police do not hold themselves above the law.”

Sellinger said he attended a town hall five weeks ago in Trenton where residents “raised concerns about excessive force, concerns about stops and searches done for no good reason.” Still, he and Clarke said no single incident prompted the probe.

But Trenton police have a long history of brutality and alarming encounters that have resulted in lawsuits and indictments:

• An officer was criminally indicted last year for pepper-spraying an elderly man, Joseph Ahr, on his porch after officers went to the home to talk to his son in 2020. Ahr died three weeks later.
• Two officers were charged in 2019 for beating a man after a routine traffic stop.
• An officer’s 2022 shooting of an unarmed motorist, which left him paralyzed, drove the city council president to demand more transparency and ask for the police director’s resignation. The director, Steve Wilson, remains in charge, and a Mercer County grand jury deemed the shooting justified.
• Officers made headlines in 2020 after they restrained a man in mental crisis by kneeling on him as he lay face-down in the dirt until he fell limp. He was declared dead minutes later.

In the state’s most recent report on major discipline meted out to law enforcement officers statewide, just one Trenton officer faced major discipline — for using a police department wash ticket to wash his personal vehicle. The police department has about 250 officers, and Trenton is the state’s fifth largest city.

Wilson’s office referred questions to Mayor Reed Gusciora, a Democrat who was a longtime state Assemblyman until he became Trenton mayor in 2018.

In a statement, Gusciora said he learned of the investigation Tuesday morning and has instructed all levels of city government to fully cooperate.

“My administration knows all too well the difficulty and danger police officers face on a daily basis. We thank and support the overwhelming majority of officers at the city, county, and state level who do the right things every day to keep Trentonians safe,” Gusciora said.

He credited Trenton officers for seizing drugs, more than 200 guns, and $133,722 from gun and drug traffickers in recent months.

“But we also recognize that the community’s trust in our police force is critical,” Gusciora said. “If any members of law enforcement violate the public trust or act in contravention of our state and federal laws, they should and must be held accountable.”

Patrick Colligan and Michael Cipriano, who head the state and city Policemen’s Benevolent Association, respectively, put out a joint statement that they “understand and respect the purpose” of the investigation and “remain committed to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.”

“However, we hope that this inquiry will also shed light on the pressing need for additional resources and support for our officers,” the statement read.

Trenton police respond to more than 100,000 calls for service a year, including 41 shootings in just the past month alone, Colligan and Cipriano said.

“Our police headquarters is in dire need of repair, and resources have been limited. The loss of 105 officers in 2012 has had a lasting impact, and we have yet to recover to a safe staffing level,” they said. “Retention of officers remains a significant concern, with the Covid-19 pandemic adding unprecedented burdens to our staffing levels.”

Sellinger said investigators’ goal is to improve policing.

“The object of a pattern and practice investigation is not to assign blame,” Sellinger said. “It’s to help fix problems that may exist. Whatever our findings may be, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the people of Trenton are served by a police force that effectively fights crime while respecting the constitutional rights of every person.”

Photo credits: New Jersey Monitor, Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora (Edwin J. Torres Governor’s Office)

Originally published on October 24th, 2023, in the New Jersey Monitor.

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Group of FL Republicans want D.C. mayor to remove Black Lives Matter mural

BY: MiTCH PERRY 

Claiming that the Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated support for Hamas following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel, six Florida Republicans, including U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, are calling on Washington, D.C., Mayor Miriam Bowser to rename Black Lives Matter Plaza in the nation’s capital and remove the street mural that bears the organization’s name.

As protests broke out against police brutality and racial inequality in the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in June 2020, a mural featuring the words “Black Lives Matter” in 50-foot-tall capital yellow letters was painted alongside two blocks of 16th Street NW, just outside of the White House. The area was renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza NW” by Bowser, according to Washington.org, the city’s official tourism website.

Now 25 GOP members of Congress have written a letter to Bowser, urging her to “immediately” rename Black Lives Matter Plaza and erase the mural “due to that movement’s celebration of violent antisemitic terrorism.”

Along with Rubio and Scott, four Florida House Republicans — Scott Franklin from Polk County, John Rutherford from Jacksonville, Gus Bilirakis from Pasco County, and North Central Florida’s Michael Waltz — all signed the letter.

As proof of that sentiment, the Republicans cite a now deleted tweet sent out by the Chicago BLM chapter which showed an image of a Palestinian terrorist paragliding into Israel to kill Jews with the caption, “I stand with Palestine.”

They also say the D.C. chapter of BLM posted that Israel was guilty of apartheid, “while sharing posts that cast doubt on the atrocities that took place on Oct. 7, including the beheading of babies.” And they wrote that BLM Grassroots, which they claim is “the ideological leader of BLM right now, also threw its support behind these murderous attacks.”

“These posts are meant to delegitimize Israel and rationalize brutal attacks on the Jewish people,” the Republicans write in their letter.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion that these statements are motivated by an ugly animus against the Jewish people. BLM Grassroots said the Hamas attack ‘must not be condemned but understood’ as resistance to ’75 years of settler colonialism and apartheid.’ Those 75 years account for the entire existence of the Jewish state,” they wrote.

“You stated after the attacks that you ‘reject terrorism in all its forms’ and that ‘antisemitism has no place in our institutions, our country, our world, or our hearts,’” the letter to Bowser continues. “We wholeheartedly agree with this statement. We further believe that movements that celebrate violent antisemitism should not be honored by the government with a plaza, especially one located directly outside of our nation’s White House.”

The idea of removing the BLM mural rankles some in the Black community, however.“The mural was put up there at a moment when African-Americans and the nation were going through a lot of stress at the time,” says Yvette Lewis, the Hillsborough County chair of the NAACP. “It sounds like politicians are using this as an excuse to get rid of it and justify their means.”

Lewis says when she hears the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” she’s thinking about the sentiment behind it, not any organization.

“When I say Black Lives Matter, I’m referring to my life, not an organization. So when I say that, don’t equate me with antisemitism. My thing is that mural was put there for a reason, not for an organization, but for the lives that have been killed at the hands of police and law enforcement.”

Apology

The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter apologized on Oct. 11 on X for the post mentioned in the letter sent to Bowser.

“Yesterday we sent out msgs that we aren’t proud of,” the group wrote. “We stand with Palestine & the people who will do what they must to live free. Our hearts are with the grieving mothers, those rescuing babies from rubble, who are in danger of being wiped out completely.”

BLM Grassroots sent out a message on their Instagram page on Oct. 10 regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict. “When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense,” the group wrote.

The Phoenix reached out to both Mayor Bowser and BLM Grassroots for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

Israel has been at war with Hamas since the surprise attacks that killed 1,400 people, including at least 32 U.S. citizens. Hamas continues to hold around 200 hostages, including Americans.

Palestinian officials said Tuesday that 704 people were killed overnight and more than 5,700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the fighting began, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday afternoon. The paper adds that those numbers couldn’t be independently verified.

Originally published on October 24th, 2023, in the Florida Phoenix.

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The private prison industry in FL is now changing; the state is taking more control

By: Mitch Perry 

When private prisons began operating nearly 30 years ago in Florida, they were one of the few systems in the nation to place oversight outside of the usual state corrections administration.

Now, after a damning audit released a year ago showing failures in oversight, the Department of Corrections has taken over the oversight of seven private prisons. The move began this month following legislation passed in the spring and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The transition means that the state’s Department of Management Services (DMS) will no longer be overseeing those seven private prisons.

Of the 85,145 inmates now in prisons in Florida, slightly more than 10,000 are housed in those seven private facilities, according to Department of Corrections Deputy Secretary Richard Comerford, who spoke before the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee on Wednesday.

The impetus for transferring the oversight to the FDC stems from a June 2022 Florida Auditor General audit of the DMS which found seven areas of deficiencies, including bureau monitoring of private correctional facility staffing. That means the facilities needed enhancements to ensure that appropriate and qualified staff were assigned to provide for and maintain the security, control, custody, and supervision of inmates.

There are three private prison providers that run the state’s seven private prisons: CoreCivic of Tennessee, LLC, GEO Group, Inc., and Management and Training Corporation (MTC).

The audit found that the GEO Group did not adequately maintain adequate levels of security personnel at the Graceville Correctional Facility for two three-month periods in 2019, and did not properly maintain the fire safety system for three months in 2018.

It also found that MTC did not follow up on maintenance issues noted at the Gadsden Correctional Facility for 17 months (from 2018 to 2020) and that MTC could not demonstrate that key security personnel had received appropriate training in accordance with Department of Corrections requirements for five months between 2019 and 2020.

Florida is one of 27 states use private corporations to run some of their correctional facilities, according to a 2023 report by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group that promotes reforms in sentencing policies. The first private facility in the state, Gadsen Correctional Facility, opened in 1995. The most recent private prison is Blackwater in Santa Rosa County, which opened in 2010.

State law requires private prisons to cost 7 percent less than comparable state facilities.

Orange County Democratic Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis asked Comerford to list the differences in policies and procedures between the state’s corrections department and the state’s private prisons – specifically that private prisons don’t transfer out inmates who commit violent infractions as quickly as FDC’s policies require.

Comerford did acknowledge that the state system had fallen behind the private facilities when it came to funding programming and education programs for inmates, but he said with recent funding from the Legislature, “I think we’re even going to be on a level playing field when it comes to programming and education.”

Originally published on October 18th, 2023, in the Florida Phoenix.

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Bills to improve voting access for incarcerated individuals draw support from lawmakers, advocates

‘Pennsylvania can care about our democracy and promoting real justice and safety,’ state Rep. Rick Krajewski said

BY: CASSIE MILLER - 

With the general election weeks away, lawmakers and advocates are calling for legislation to better inform incarcerated Pennsylvanians about their right to vote and permit them to vote via absentee ballot. 

Supporters of House Bill 1756 and its counterpart House Bill 1757 — bills that would permit all incarcerated individuals to vote in Pennsylvania, provide voter information to correctional facilities, and direct the Department of State to create a “uniform policy for civic education” in correctional institutions — gathered on the Capitol steps Wednesday, hoping to garner support for the legislation currently before the House State Government Committee. 

The bill’s prime sponsor, state Rep. Rick Krajewski (D-Philadelphia) said that the legislation is needed to prevent “de-facto disenfranchisement.”

“This process will include dissemination of registration forms, ballot applications and ballots, civic education for voters to learn how to cast their vote, and designated staff to handle the collection and return of ballots. We will also be collecting data from each facility to oversee the effectiveness of their procedures,” Krajewski said. 

As long as they have been citizens for at least one month before the next election and will be at least 18 years of age on election day, many incarcerated individuals are currently allowed to vote in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The list includes pretrial detainees, convicted misdemeanants, individuals who have been released (or will be released by the date of the next election) from a correctional facility or halfway house upon completion of their term of incarceration for conviction of a misdemeanor or a felony, individuals who are on probation or released on parole, and individuals who are under house arrest, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. 

The problem, lawmakers said, is that many eligible individuals don’t know it. 

“If you can empower and engage folks on the inside, who are at one of their lowest moments, and get them to engage in our democracy — What happens when they come home?” state Rep. Chris Rabb (D-Philadelphia) asked. “What kind of ambassadors, what kind of advocates are they going to be? Say: ‘Look, I voted, and I was on the inside, what’s your excuse?’”

Rabb, who said supporting the bill was “a no-brainer” for him, called the pair of bills “super voter” bills for their ability to empower more Pennsylvanians to cast their votes on election day. 

“Having people closest to the pain informed the policy — that will allow for justice for all,” Rabb said. 

State Rep. Aerion Abney, a Democrat representing Allegheny County, echoed Rabb’s comments about the potential impact of the legislation. 

“If you are someone who is extremely passionate about protecting our democracy, and expanding access to the ballot and voting rights, then this bill is for you,” state Rep. Aerion Abney (D-Allegheny) said. “If you are someone that cares about criminal justice reform, and protecting the rights of the people who are in our county jails, this bill is also for you as well.”

The rally to support the bills comes just a day after students from across the commonwealth gathered at the Capitol for another voting-related cause, urging lawmakers to consider two bills that would end closed primary elections in Pennsylvania and bring more voters to the polls on election day. 

The flurry of activity around voting rights is also happening as the Legislature quibbles over when Pennsylvania’s 2024 presidential primary should be held, as the current April 23 date conflicts with Passover.

“We have the opportunity to rewrite history,” Krajewski said. “Pennsylvania has historically been one of the worst states in our country when it comes to our carceral system. While we have the wind behind our backs, while we have this majority, we must use this political moment to say another world is possible, that Pennsylvania can be a state that believes everyone deserves a second chance, that Pennsylvania can care about our democracy and promoting real justice and safety.”

Photo credit: Cassie Miller 

Originally published on October 18th, 2023, in Penn Capital-Star

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Kaiser Settlement Sends Strong Message to Providers That Ignore Patient Needs

A California settlement compels the state’s largest health care provider to spend $150 million on behavioral health services.

• MARK KREIDLER
• OCT 16, 2023

Kaiser Permanente’s $200 million settlement with the State of California for its 
repeated failures to provide patients with adequate and timely mental health care 
was a long while coming.  The deficiencies themselves? Kaiser’s own employees 
say they’ve been hiding in plain sight.

“Years and years of banging our heads against the wall have finally paid off,” said Ilana Marcucci-Morris, a therapist at Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center. “This has the potential to make Kaiser a leader in mental health care, rather than a serial violator of mental health care laws.”

The settlement, announced late Thursday by the state’s Department of Managed Health Care, includes a $50 million fine — the largest the department has ever levied against a health plan, Director Mary Watanabe said in a statement. Kaiser also pledged to spend $150 million over five years to build out behavioral health services that critics say have been woefully underdeveloped for years, leading to appointment wait times that violated state standards.

The settlement resulted from the department’s enforcement investigation and a nonroutine survey of Kaiser’s practices last year, which identified “several deficiencies and violations in the plan’s provision of behavioral health care services to enrollees,” the department said in a news release. Those included long delays for patients trying to schedule mental health appointments, a failure to contract enough high-level behavioral care facilities within its network, and Kaiser not making out-of-network referrals consistent with requirements under the law when in-network providers were not available, the department said.

Under the settlement, Kaiser must hire an outside consultant “to focus on corrective actions” related to access, referrals, appeals and grievances and to ensure that patients receive the mental health care they need, regardless of the type or severity of their conditions.

“Today’s actions represent a tectonic shift in terms of our accountability on the delivery of behavioral health services,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. Newsom said the settlement aims to “provide Kaiser patients with the care they are entitled to in a timely manner.”

In a statement, Kaiser CEO Greg A. Adams said the agreement “takes full accountability for our performance during the survey period including our shortcomings, acknowledges our work to improve mental health care, and ensures that our ongoing investments not only help the members of Kaiser Permanente but also build a stronger mental health foundation in the communities we serve.”

Critics have argued that Kaiser patients haven’t received adequate care for years, despite previous enforcement actions. Kaiser paid a $4 million fine in 2013 for not providing its members proper access to mental health care. Four years later, it agreed to redress similar failures. Yet Kaiser has consistently left patients without follow-up mental health appointments for weeks, sometimes months, state officials and critics have said.

The situation reached a boiling point last fall, when more than 2,000 mental health professionals affiliated with the National Union of Healthcare Workers walked off the job, frustrated during contract negotiations by what they said was Kaiser’s refusal to address persistent staffing issues and long wait times for behavioral services. (Disclosure: NUHW is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Capital & Main reported in 2021 and again last year that Kaiser workers said wait times for mental health appointments often stretched four to eight weeks or more. Jenny Butera, a marriage and family therapist in Sacramento who has since left Kaiser, said on Aug. 14 last year, “My earliest next appointment (is) mid-October — for anybody.” The American Psychological Association said in 2020 that it had never “seen such an egregious case of delayed access for follow-up appointments.”

The DMHC paid attention to such stories, and legislation that took effect last summer required providers such as Kaiser to schedule follow-up appointments for mental health care patients within 10 days of their last visit. In the wake of Thursday’s announced settlement, the department said its survey continues and could prompt a modified corrective plan.

“This settlement is a monumental victory for Kaiser Permanente patients and its mental health therapists who have waged multiple strikes over the past decade to make Kaiser fix its broken behavioral healthcare system,” said union President Sal Rosselli. “The DMHC’s report affirms everything that Kaiser therapists have said about their patients’ inability to receive timely, adequate mental health care.”

In his statement, Adams said demand for Kaiser’s mental health care services rose 33% during the COVID-19 pandemic and that 20% more people have sought care in 2023 than at the same time last year. He added that “an ongoing shortage of qualified mental health professionals,” along with clinician burnout and turnover and the 10-week strike last year, made it “very difficult to meet this growing need for care.”

The union has disputed Kaiser’s characterization, arguing that qualified therapists fled Kaiser over the years because of unreasonable workloads and short-staffing practices that predated the pandemic.

Kaiser Permanente is the largest health care provider in California, with 9.4 million residents using the system. The company was founded as a nonprofit, though its Permanente Medical Groups operate as for-profit entities. Kaiser reported a record $8.1 billion in net revenue in 2021 before showing a loss in 2022 — the only year since 2007 that the company has posted negative income.

Kaiser therapists have complained for years that Kaiser paid scant attention to the mental health care needs of its patients — a fairly common practice among health providers, industry economists say. Thursday’s settlement will change the math a bit.

“It makes me feel hopeful, knowing they have to put money into this,” Marcucci-Morris said. “We’ve been pushing for well over a decade.”

Capital & Main

The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.

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Solidarity with the Palestinian right to resist

Only history can place the October 7th Palestinian military action in Israel in its proper context – an act of self-defense in response to a steadily increasing, all-encompassing Israeli assault on Palestinians in the occupied territories, in general, and the “open-air prison” of Gaza in particular. The December 12th Movement International Secretariat strongly supports the Palestinian people in the righteous exercise of their internationally-guaranteed human rights.

Why Black People Should Be Concerned

Black people cannot allow ourselves to be misguided by the U.S. government/mainstream media narrative of what is going on in the Middle East.

As with much of U.S. history, Israel’s began with a myth – “A land without a people, for a people without a land” - to justify its 1948 creation as a settler-colonial state. In many ways, the Palestinian struggle for liberation reflects our struggle in the U.S. Just as the U.S. government domestic policy has historically perpetrated and profited from Black people’s forcible oppression here, its foreign policy does the same around the world, but particularly clearly in Palestine. The U.S. was instrumental in Israel’s establishment and the forced displacement of the Palestinian who lived there. It has unqualifiedly backed it with money, weapons, intelligence, aid, propaganda and political cover ever since. Israel is the U.S.’s “eyes, ears, caretaker and bodyguard” in a critical oil-rich, non-white, non-European, geo-economic-political area.

Israel has now declared a “complete siege” on Gaza and has cut off water, electricity, fuel and food to the already impoverished area. Israel has held Gaza in a state of siege for the last 17 years since Hamas began governing. Israel said that it will “exterminate” Hamas. Hamas is the government of Gaza, not simply a military force. Hamas is an integral part of the 2.4 million people of Gaza, an area the size of Detroit (population 620,000) and one of the most densely populated areas of the world. Israel cannot separate its extermination of Hamas from the people of Gaza. Nevertheless President Biden “has Israel’s back.”

When the entire world has united to condemn Israeli atrocities, the U.S. “has its back.” Between 1972 and 2021, the United States vetoed over 53 UN resolutions against Israel.i Major international human rights organizations have accused Israel of being an apartheid regime.ii And this is not surprising as Israel was one of the few open supporters of the South African Apartheid state. Nevertheless, the U.S. “had its back.”

So we must pay close attention to what is going on in the world, even if it seem unrelated to us. Malcolm X said if we fail to do so, we’ll treat our friends as enemies and our enemies as friends. The Palestinian people are our friends.

We must:

• Demand that the CBC support the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and self-defense
• Condemn Israeli State and colonial violence against the Palestinian people
• Demand that the U.S. end all aid to Israel
• Defend the Palestinian Movement and community in the U.S.
• Demand the Release of all (5000) Palestinian prisoners (including 1350 being held without charge or trial)

i UN Security Council Veto List; Newton, Creede, “A History of the U.S. Blocking UN Resolutions against Israel,” Al Jazeera, 5/19/2021

ii Amnesty International Report, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity,” 2/1/2022