The Irish do love a good story and a good celebration. The celebration of St. Patrick’s Day has evolved from the observance of the death of St. Patrick in the fifth century into a celebration of Irish culture and heritage. The corned beef, cabbage, potatoes and Guinness I understand, the green beer–not so much.

While the modern day “Wearing O’ the Green” for many, adds to the fun, the original adoption of green ribbons, clothing and hats by the Society of United Irishmen and the street ballad “The Wearing of the Green” (lamenting the oppression of the 1798 Irish rebellion) was never known by many and forgotten by most.

During the 700 years of British colonial rule of Ireland, the Irish like all subjects of British settler colonialism suffered violence and coercion to further the economic power of the Empire. The methods of how to control native populations, the land and natural resources varied from empire to empire, but those methods resulted in resistance and often wars of rebellion. World wide, whether in Ireland, India, Africa, Asia the Americas or the Palestinian state– people, eventually, will reject their oppressors.

On this St. Patrick’s Day we would do well to remember a chapter of often forgotten history, the relationship between the Irish people and the Choctaw Nation. In 1847, during the worst of the Irish famine, the Choctaw nation, roughly 15 years after their forced journey from their ancestral home in Mississippi to Indian territory in Oklahoma the “trail of tears and death”, collected and sent $170 –over $5,000 in today’s money to Midleton in County Cork Ireland.

The Choctaw, unlike the British government, recognized the humanity and suffering of the Irish people, even as the Choctaw still suffered and had little to give. They had been forced to cede 11 million acres, they still mourned lost family members, yet they gave what they could, seeing the their own suffering now lived by the Irish.

Often, times of suffering and adversity bring out, as Lincoln called it, “the better angles of our nature”. The people of Ireland and the Choctaw nation shared a common suffering and formed a common bond that still exists. In 2018, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar visited the Choctaw nation in Oklahoma and noted, “A few years ago, on a visit to Ireland, a representative of the Choctaw Nation called your support for us ‘a sacred memory’ it is that and more. It is a sacred bond, which has joined our peoples together for all time. Your act of kindness has never been, and never will be, forgotten in Ireland.”

Indeed they did not forget and in 2020, as the Navajo and Hopi tribes suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Irish people citing the generosity of the Choctaws, raised nearly $2 million for the Navajo and Hopi peoples. In gratitude for the gift, Gary Batton, chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said, “We have become kindred spirits with the Irish in the years since the Irish potato famine,” he said. “We hope the Irish, Navajo and Hopi peoples develop lasting friendships, as we have.”

Colonialism has a long and tragic history, sadly still seen today. If only as an afterthought, while celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, we should remember the common bond that exists between the oppressed peoples of the world. Perhaps we might call upon those “better angels of our nature” and do what we can to resist the oppression here, in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Africa, and realize that across oceans or even across the street, we must recognize each other’s humanity.

The post Kindred Spirits on St. Patrick’s Day appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jim Goodman.

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The last time Missouri took control of St. Louis’ police force was just before the start of the Civil War, when the state’s secessionist-leaning leaders were trying to prevent police officers from taking up arms against the Confederacy.

The law that put the police department under state control was in effect for the next 152 years. In November 2012, nearly two-thirds of voters approved a statewide ballot measure, pushed by police reform activists and elected officials, that restored local authority and placed the department under the mayor’s jurisdiction.

Now, the state’s Republican governor and GOP-led legislature are again pushing to take over the St. Louis Police Department. They argue that the Democratic-run city government is responsible for a drop in officer morale and that statistics that show a decline in crime are inaccurate.

The Missouri House voted 106-47 last week to transfer control from the city to a state-appointed board this summer. The five-member board would be made up of the mayor and four commissioners appointed by the governor, essentially leaving the governor with the votes to control the police department.

The state Senate is debating the measure, but a vote has not yet been scheduled.

The attempt to reverse a measure overwhelmingly approved by state voters, albeit more than a decade ago, is part of a broader pattern of Missouri’s conservative-led government trying to override the will of the electorate, from repealing voter-approved redistricting reform to trying to reinstate an abortion ban even though voters approved a constitutional amendment last year legalizing the procedure.

State takeovers of metropolitan police departments are rare; Kansas City, Missouri, remains the only major U.S. city with its police force under state control. Its arrangement dates to Reconstruction, when Missouri lawmakers, aiming to limit Black political influence, stripped the city of its oversight role.

After a brief return to local control in the 1930s, the state reasserted authority over Kansas City police to weaken political boss Tom Pendergast, who had used the department for patronage and election fraud.

Baltimore recently regained control of its police department after 160 years of state control.

Republican-led states have taken away control of other aspects of government from local leaders in other cities with majority-Black populations. In Mississippi, officials have expanded the jurisdiction of the state-run Capitol Police beyond government buildings into residential and commercial areas in Jackson, the state capital. They’ve also created a state-run court with appointed judges and increased police funding while the Black-led Jackson Police Department struggles to respond to calls.

Texas and Missouri have intervened in local schools and city governments, leading to disputes about local control — though these takeovers have generally been temporary, with a path to restoring local authority. In Tennessee, the state comptroller backed down from taking over the majority-Black city of Mason after local officials agreed that a certified public accounting or law firm would help the town complete audits, balance its budget and train officials on proper use of tax revenue. It happens in states led by Democrats, too, but less frequently.

“It really is removing this political power from residents, allowing them to have less authority, oversight and voice in how their system of public safety and policing operates,” said Sandhya Kajeepeta, a senior researcher at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute.

Some St. Louis leaders see the current effort there as echoing 19th-century efforts to limit Black political power. They argue that a majority-white, conservative government is again moving to strip authority from local officials and diminish Black influence over policing.

State Sen. Karla May, a Black Democrat from St. Louis who has testified against the push for state control, said it’s no coincidence that the plan became an urgent matter for legislators, and is advancing, during the tenure of Mayor Tishaura Jones, who also is Black.

May said the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the collective bargaining unit for city police officers, “does not want to be controlled by an African American mayor.” Representatives from the union did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Jones did not make her available for an interview. But the mayor said in an emailed statement that “I don’t think Republican legislators want to give a Black woman who is also a Democrat credit for dramatically reducing crime, increasing officer pay and building out successful public safety programs.” She said advocates for state control have never explained how it would improve public safety.

The push to take control of the St. Louis police is a top priority for Gov. Mike Kehoe, a newly elected Republican whose State of the State address framed the issue in economic terms. He said what mattered was whether businesses felt “safe enough to invest in our cities.” Kehoe, who is white, frequently invokes his upbringing in St. Louis to push for state control.

The House sponsor of the measure, Rep. Brad Christ, a white Republican from the southwestern suburbs of St. Louis, argues that calling his proposal “state control” is misleading because the governor’s appointees would be required to have lived in the city for at least three years.

He noted that the effort to return the police to the state predates Jones’ term as mayor. A Black Democrat from St. Louis filed a similar bill that stalled in the House in 2019 during the tenure of Mayor Lyda Krewson, who is white. Christ said in a text that this was “clear evidence that the wild assertion that this effort has been race motivated is completely false.”

The Ethical Society of Police, a group that represents Black police officers in St. Louis, also supports a state takeover. Its president, Donnell Walters, wrote an opinion piece in 2023 with then-Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, calling for state control and alleging mismanagement and low morale under city control.

Walters did not return messages seeking comment.

Heather Taylor, a retired sergeant who led ESOP from 2015 to 2020 — and who later worked in the Jones administration before resigning in 2023 after criticizing the mayor and the department on social media — said she worries the department will suffer under state control. But, she said, ESOP members believe that the city lacks urgency in providing basic support for officers and that the state might do a better job addressing those needs.

Jones has repeatedly pointed to city crime data showing a decline since she hired Robert Tracy as police chief two years ago. Notably, the city’s murder totals have plummeted.

But many argue that the city’s statistics on other types of crimes don’t reflect the sense of lawlessness in St. Louis. Ness Sandoval, a professor of sociology and demography at Saint Louis University who studies crime trends, said he believes the city underreports crime and lacks transparency. “Most people who rely on the data believe there probably should be an asterisk,” he said. Jones has stood behind the crime numbers, saying they are accurate.

Still, the mayor and her police chief maintain that state control does not necessarily reduce crime. In 2012, while the police were still under state oversight, Forbes magazine ranked St. Louis as the second-most-dangerous city in the nation.

Kansas City, which is still under state control, continues to struggle with violent crime. Efforts to restore local oversight have never gained much traction there. Despite past studies and proposals — including a 1968 report listing local control as the top recommendation after police killed six Black residents during riots, and a 2013 mayoral committee vote for local control that failed by a single vote — no serious push has materialized.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler.

Janine Jackson interviewed Inside Climate News‘ Victoria St. Martin about suing Big Oil for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: A lot of us have started seeing local weather forecasts with numbers unfamiliar to us for this time of year. As reporters, you could treat that as, “Oh, isn’t that curious? How are folks on the street dealing with this? Are sales of sunscreen going up?” Or, as a reporter, you can seriously engage the predicted, disastrous effects of fossil fuel production as predicted and disastrous—not, though, in terms of what, in other contexts, we would call criminal.

So what does it look like when business as usual is called out as an actual crime? Our next guest is reporting on an important case in a county in Oregon.

Veteran journalist and educator Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Victoria St. Martin.

Victoria St. Martin: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here.

Inside Climate News (7/8/24)

JJ: So what happened in summer 2021 in northwest Oregon, such that it became the subject of scientific study? What happened there? What were the harms?

VSM: The county called this a “heat dome disaster,” but basically there was a heat dome over three days in June of ’21 that recorded highs of 108°, 112°, 116°  Fahrenheit. During that time, 69 people died from heat stroke, and most of them were in their homes.

Typically, in this part of Oregon, they have very gentle summers. The highs top out at about 81°. But this was unprecedented.

And one of the attorneys that is working with the county says this was not an act of God. This was not caused by God, but caused by climate change.

JJ: And that’s exactly the point. Oftentimes, folks might be surprised to hear, but environmental impacts were legitimately, legally written off, if you will, as acts of God. This is just nature, this is just what’s happening. So this is actually something new.

VSM: Yes. The attorney that I was speaking about, his name’s Jeffrey B. Simon; he is a lawyer for the county. He talks about this idea of how, no, this is not an act of God. This catastrophe was caused by “several of the world’s largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people, by selling as much oil and gas as they could.”

JJ: What is a heat dome, just for folks who might not know?

VSM: Let’s see, how would I describe it? I would call it the atmosphere creating an intense umbrella of heat, and especially in areas where they don’t typically see this type of heat, like northwest Oregon. We’ve had heat domes this summer already, all across the nation, in places that typically don’t have this type of high heat.

JJ: So it’s a thing we all need to get familiar with. If you don’t know what it means today, you need to figure it out for tomorrow.

VSM: Yeah, some scientists, they say it’s like the atmosphere traps hot air, and, yeah, I said an umbrella, but like a lid or a cap being put on a bottle, and trapping that hot air for days like it did in northwest Oregon.

JJ: We’ve had issues with news media who want to separate the stories. It’s not that they don’t cover things, it’s that they don’t connect dots. They separate a story from: Here was a heat emergency, in this particular case, and it was horrible, and people suffered from it. And then on another page, or on another day, they’ll have a story about fossil fuel companies lobbyists influencing laws. But part of the problem with news media is they don’t connect these things.

And so I wonder, as a person who, besides being a journalist, a person who thinks about journalism, where are the gaps or the omissions or the missing dots that you think that media could be doing on this could-not-be-more-important story of climate disruption?

Victoria St. Martin: “To connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more.”

VSM: Yes. One of my editors says that covering climate, it’s one of the greatest stories of the century, right, the greatest story of our lifetime, that we are covering. And I think one thing that we did well, journalism-wise, in the past 10 or so years, is we’ve pushed this idea that journalists have to be multidimensional, that they have to know how to edit photo and video and create a graphic and write a story.

But what I think was lost in that, and what is important here and what is missing in these heat dome stories, these stories that are very, very plainly, as you can see, climate change stories, but what is missing here is journalists aren’t necessarily trained to be multidimensional in subject matter.

And while there are environmental desks growing in newsrooms throughout the nation, newsrooms aren’t allowing the journalists interdisciplinary roles, to be able to cover a weather event and talk about climate. And we need to do more of that.  I think in order to connect those dots, to connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more of that.

I love how last summer, I think I really saw it come to a head, because the Canadian wildfires came to the East Coast and turned the skies orange in New York. And it was this story you could not ignore anymore. And it forced newsrooms to really start talking about wildfires, and is it safe to breathe the air? And what is the air pollution from a wildfire, and what causes wildfires? I think we need to do more of that.

While I don’t want climate disasters like wildfires to continue to happen, I do want journalists to think on their toes, think on their feet, think multidimensional, and be able to tell stories in a full and nuanced way, because we are not servicing our readers, our viewers, our listeners, if we aren’t. Our viewers, our listeners and our readers are here to get the full story, and we need to give them the full story and the full picture.

JJ: And just finally, in terms of journalistic framework, what I think is so interesting with the Multnomah County story is we’re moving the actions of fossil fuel companies into the category of crime. You knew this was going to cause harm, and you still did it, and it caused harm, and that’s a crime. And I feel like that’s, for journalism, for media, that’s a framework shift. Lobbying is a story, and legislative influence is a story. And then crime is a whole different story, and a whole other page. But if we’re talking about actions that cause people to die, that cause people to be harmed, well, then, a lot of things that fossil fuels companies are doing are crimes, and that’s what’s paradigm-breaking with this Multnomah County story.

VSM: I think also what’s different here is the attorneys reaching out once the county filed suit, once the attorneys filed suit, letting us know what’s happening, making sure that the story is amplified and gets out there. I think I appreciate it always, as a journalist, when there’s an open dialogue, and that I’m able to share the story with readers, viewers and listeners, because I had access to information, I had access to the lawsuit.

I think, what is that saying? When a tree falls in the forest….  I’m so thankful that somebody called me up and said, “Hey, this is what’s happening.” So I think everybody does their part, and I think in this case, it was a moment of allowing journalists to be a part of that process, and to be able to see behind the curtain and see what’s actually happening. Sometimes law can be…

JJ: Opaque.

VSM: …slow and boring and monotonous, and I think, just like anything, like science…. But I think when you allow journalists to have a front-row seat, it helps to tell the story.

JJ: Absolutely.

Well, any final thoughts in terms of what you would like folks to take away from this piece that you wrote about the effort to call fossil fuel companies out for the harms that they’re causing? Any tips for other journalists who might be looking at the same story?

VSM: I think one thing I constantly thought about when I was reporting this story, and something I did not see, is there’s a great database looking at lawsuits that have been filed by states and counties and cities that are seeking damages from oil and gas companies for the harms caused by climate change.

Again, there are about three dozen lawsuits out there right now, but this is one of the only lawsuits that is focused on a heat dome. And so this is what makes that case unique. This is what sets this case apart from the rest. And, for me, that was important to report.

So I’m thankful that you got to read it, and that others have gotten to read it, and I hope more people read about it. I think that was key here, and that was something I did not see before.  There are other lawsuits, but this one, a lot of law experts think, could really change the game here, because it’s focusing on a specific disaster, and how this county is going to pay for the costs that they’ve incurred from the effects of the heat dome.

I think for journalists, when we’re reporting on these things, think of ways to get ahead of the pack, think of what makes the story unique, what sets the story apart from other weather event stories, or other climate change stories, and how to really help paint a picture about how important this story is.

Sixty-nine people died over the course of three days. That is huge, and it is something that, for me, needed to be at the top of the story. The fact that this was one of the only cases that looked at heat dome disasters, that was something that needed to be at the top of the story for me. And I hope to keep reporting on this, so I can’t wait to see what happens next.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Victoria St. Martin. You can find her work on this and other stories at InsideClimateNews.org. Victoria St. Martin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VSM: Thank you so much.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

ExxonKnews (6/17/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see, public interest be damned. So the crickets you’re hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That’s all intentional.  We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.

Inside Climate News (7/8/24)

Also and related: Not everyone is lying down and accepting that, OK, we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making, and we’ll address it that way. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.

Employing the law to silence dissent on life or death concerns, or using the law to engage those concerns head on—that’s this week on CounterSpin!

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The online religious charter school is sectarian and not permitted to receive any public funding, said the court. Writing for the majority, Justice James Winchester said that, “the contract between the state board and St. Isidore violates the Oklahoma Constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act and the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.” He added that, “Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school. As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.” Winchester also stated that, “What St. Isidore requests from this court is beyond the fair treatment of a private religious institution in receiving a generally available benefit, implicating the free exercise clause. It is about the state’s creation and funding of a new religious institution violating the establishment clause.”

The Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause make up the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Justice Dustin P. Rowe dissented from much of the majority opinion while Justice Dana Kuehn dissented entirely with the majority.

Reuters stated that the religious online charter school would have siphoned about $26 million from public coffers in the first five years of operation. The real amount is likely higher. Charter schools across the country siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools, increase segregation, and fail and close regularly.

This unprecedented ruling blocks what would have been the first publicly funded religious charter school in the U.S. It invalidates the approval in October 2023 of St. Isidore by the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, an entity comprised mostly of unelected private persons. Charter school authorizers around the country typically consist of many unelected individuals from the business sector. Such entities usually embrace capital-centered ideas and policies.

The sponsors of the deregulated virtual charter school, the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa, have openly stated that the religious virtual charter school would be open to students statewide, rely directly on Catholic teachings, and use public funds to operate. Catholic leaders have never concealed their mission to evangelize students at the online religious charter school. In fact, St. Isidore students would not only “be taught Catholic doctrine,” they would also be “required to attend mass,” reported Oklahoma Voice.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court ordered the termination of St. Isidore’s contract with the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which became the new Statewide Charter School Board on July 1, 2024. “The [nine-person] board will succeed the [five-person] Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which oversaw only online charter schools in Oklahoma,” says The Oklahoman. The new entity will oversee all charter schools in the state and will be comprised mainly of unelected business people with greater responsibilities and powers.

For their part, the Catholic sponsors of the virtual charter school have pledged to appeal the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they plan to open the online religious charter school in the 2025-2026 school year. On July 5, attorneys for the online religious charter school asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court for a stay of its order to have its contract rescinded by the new Statewide Charter School Board until the U.S. Supreme Court considers the case. The new Statewide Charter School Board, which met for the first time on July 8, held off on terminating the virtual school’s contract. The new unelected board claims that it is waiting to see how legal proceedings play out in the coming weeks and months. On July 17, Drummond scolded the new board for not rescinding the contract for the Catholic virtual charter school. He told the new board, “You must know and accept that no state agency, board, or commission may willfully ignore an order from Oklahoma’s highest court.” Private religious forces are hoping that recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court that further abolish the distinction between public and private will work in their favor.

Such developments and contradictions arise in the context of neoliberal forces working for the last few decades to restructure the state in ways that change governance and administrative arrangements to expand privatization. Blurring the public-private distinction is central to neoliberal efforts to further privilege private interests while marginalizing the public interest. This is why today there is little distinction between the state and Wall Street. We live in a system of direct rule by the rich. Private monopoly interests, not the public, control the economy and the state. In the years ahead, major owners of capital will strive to further dominate the state so as to privatize more institutions, programs, enterprises, services, and governance itself.

“Public” and “private,” it should be stressed, are legal, political, philosophical, and sociological categories that mean the exact opposite of each other; they are antonyms. Confounding them is problematic, both conceptually and practically. It is self-serving, not just intellectually lazy, to mix up two sharply distinct categories like “public” and “private.” It is like saying hot and cold mean the same thing. In its essence, private property is the right to exclude others from use of said property; it is the power of exclusion; [1] It is not concerned with transparency, inclusion, the common good, or benefitting everyone.

State constitutions typically prohibit states from using public money to support or benefit religious institutions and entities. As a general rule, states cannot use public money to fund religious schools. Historically, there has been a powerful trend in U.S. society to keep religion and state separate (the so-called “wall of separation between church and state”). Modern conditions and requirements dictate that states must avoid sponsoring, promoting, funding, or privileging any religion. There can be no “religious liberty” when a state sponsors, funds, privileges, or entangles itself with any religion or sect. The state is supposed to represent the interests of all members of the polity, regardless of religion.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court argued that had St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School opened as a regular nonsectarian “public” charter school instead of a religious charter school, it could have received public funds and operated normally.

In reasoning in this manner, the court correctly negated publicly-funded sectarian education arrangements but erroneously sanctioned the continued funneling of public funds from public schools to deregulated charter schools that are public only on paper. In other words, the highest court in Oklahoma saw no problem with charter schools siphoning public funds from public schools. The court overlooked the fact that charter schools in Oklahoma, like the rest of the country, are privately-operated and differ legally, philosophically, pedagogically, and organizationally from public schools.

The court thus blundered when it repeatedly referred to charter schools as public schools in its ruling. It uncritically repeated flawed and banal assertions about the “publicness” of charter schools. It incorrectly characterized charter schools as state actors even though private entities are typically the only entities that hold charter school contracts in the U.S.

It is generally recognized that how an entity is described on paper can often differ greatly from how it operates in reality. There can be a large chasm between the two. People understand that words and deeds are not always aligned. Indeed, there has always been a big gap between rhetoric and reality in the charter school sector. Charter school owners and promoters have long confused words on paper with empirical realities. They want people to believe that just because something is on paper, it is automatically true, valid, and unassailable. They have taken abstraction of certain ideas to incoherent and detached levels, while also merging legalese and lawfare to advance their agenda. For 32 years charter school owners and promoters have strived to create a legislative veneer of respectability, but lack of legitimacy remains a nagging problem in the charter school sector.

To be clear, all charter schools in the U.S. are privately-operated and governed by unelected private persons. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not run by publicly elected people. In fact, many charter schools are directly owned-operated by for-profit corporations that openly cash in on kids as their education model. For example, most charter schools in Michigan and a few other states are openly for-profit charter schools. But even so-called “non-profit” charter schools regularly engage in profiteering.

Legally, private operators of charter schools exist outside the public sphere, which makes them private actors, not state (public) actors. Charter school operators are not government entities or political subdivisions of the state. This is why most constitutional provisions apply to public schools, which are state actors, but do not apply to the operators of charter schools or the students, teachers, and parents involved with them. Charter schools teachers, for example, are legally considered “at-will” employees, the opposite of public school teachers. The rights of teachers, students, and parents in public schools are not the same as the rights of teachers, students, and parents in charter schools.

For these and other reasons, charter schools are deregulated independent schools. As private actors, they are not subject to the same requirements as traditional public schools. They do not operate in the same way as public schools. They are not “entangled” with the state in the same way that public schools are. Charter schools do not have the same relationship with the state as public schools. The state, put simply, does not coerce, compel, influence, or direct charter schools to act in the same way as public schools. The state does not play a significant role in charter school policies and actions, certainly not in the way that it does with traditional public schools. This means that the state cannot be held responsible for the actions and policies of private actors.

In the U.S., state laws explicitly permit charter schools to avoid most laws, rules, statutes, regulations, and policies governing public schools. Charter schools can essentially “do as they please” in the name of “autonomy,” “competition,” “accountability,” “choice,” “parental empowerment,” and “results.” It is no accident that charter school advocates boast every day that charter schools are “free market” schools, which means that they are based on the law of the jungle. President Bill Clinton, a long-time supporter of charter schools, once correctly called charter schools “schools with no rules.” Charter schools have long embraced social Darwinism and a fend-for-yourself ethos.

The “free market” ideologies of competition, individualism, and consumerism are therefore central to the creation, operation, and expansion of charter schools. Fending-for-yourself in the pursuit of education is seen as natural, normal, and healthy by charter school owners and promoters. There can supposedly be no better way to organize education and life according to charter school owners and promoters. Thus, when a charter school fails and closes, one is supposed to quickly and effortlessly find a new school, complain about nothing, move on, and nonchalantly accept that “this is just how life is.” In this outdated, disruptive, and unstable set-up, one is expected to be a “rugged individual” who embraces inequality and competition. Winning and losing is supposedly inevitable. Put simply, neoliberals and privatizers do not view education as a basic human right that must be guaranteed in practice. Commodity logic—the logic of buying and selling—guides their outlook and agenda.

Further, the notion, promoted by some, that charter schools are “public-private partnerships” is also flawed and dangerous because it implies that there is a public component to charter schools and that a fair, balanced, equal, meaningful, and mutually-beneficial relationship can exist between the public sector and the private sector. This neoliberal notion covers up the fact and principle that public funds belong only to the public and must not be wielded or controlled by the private sector at any time. If the private sector wants income and revenue, then it should generate income and revenue through its own activities and operations, without using the state to seize public funds that do not belong to it. Public funds must serve the public and not be claimed by private interests through new governance arrangements that harm the public. So-called public-private “partnerships” further concentrate accumulated social wealth in private hands and restrict democracy.

It is disinformation to claim that the public sector needs the private sector for government, society, institutions, infrastructure, and programs to exist and function at a high level. The public sector would be far healthier and more human-centered if a public authority worthy of the name kept all public funds in public hands at all times and used public funds only to advance the general interests of society. It should also be recalled that the private sector has been rife with fraud, failure, scandal, and corruption for generations. We see this in the news every day. Privatization does not guarantee efficiency, success, or excellence. Privatization invariably increases corruption and negates human rights.

Other differences between charter schools and public schools include the fact that, as privatized education arrangements, charter schools cannot levy taxes like public schools and do not accept or keep all students. Unlike public schools that accept all students at all times, charter schools, which are said to be “welcoming,” “free,” and “open to all,” routinely cherry-pick students. In addition, many charter schools are legally permitted to hire uncertified teachers.

Charter schools also frequently fail to uphold even the few public standards enshrined in state charter school laws (e.g., open-meeting laws, reporting laws, enrollment requirements, and audit laws). These are laws and requirements they are supposed to embrace but often violate. It has often been said that the charter school sector is not transparent or accountable, even though it seizes billions of dollars every year from the public, leaving the public worse off—and all under the veneer of high ideals. Dozens of other differences between public schools and charter schools can be found here.

Charter, by definition, means contract. Charter schools are contract schools. Contract law is part of private law in the U.S., not public law. Private law deals with relations between private citizens, whereas public law deals with relations between the state and individuals. Thus, the legal basis and profile of charter schools differs from the legal basis and profile of public schools, which is why, as noted earlier, charter school students, parents, and workers have different rights and protections than public school students, parents, and workers.

Charter schools in the U.S. are private entities that enter into contract with the state or entities approved by the state. The state does not actually create the charter school, it mainly delegates (not authorizes) a function to the private contractor of the school; it is outsourcing education; it is commodifying a social responsibility. This outsourcing of constitutional obligations to private interests does not automatically make said interests state actors.

A private actor does not automatically and magically become a public agency with public power just because it is delegated a duty by the state through a contract. Generally speaking, not a single charter school in the U.S. is owned-operated by a public entity or government unit. Unlike public schools, charter schools are usually created by private citizens, often business people, and often with extensive support from philanthrocapitalists. These private forces or entities do not suddenly become public entities just because they contract with the state or an entity approved by the state. Partnering with the government is not the same as being part of the government. And simply receiving public funds to carry out a function does not spontaneously transform a private entity into a public entity. It is well-known that thousands of private entities in the country receive some sort of public funding but they do not suddenly stop being private entities.

Nor can charter schools be deemed public just because they are called “public” 50 times a day. Repeating something endlessly does not instantly make something true. There would actually be no need to call charter schools “charter” schools if they were public schools proper. The word “charter” before the word “school” instantly sets charter schools apart from public schools. The word “charter” creates a demarcation. Similarly, there would be no need to call charter schools “schools of choice” if they were traditional public schools. “Free market” phrases such as this one also communicate a difference between charter schools and public schools. Today, ninety percent of the nation’s roughly 50 million students attend a public school in their zip code. Neoliberals have successfully starved many of these schools of public funds over the past 45 years.

It is also worth noting that the academic performance of cyber charter schools in the U.S. is notoriously abysmal (see here, here, and here). Equally ironic in this situation is that Epic Charter Schools in Oklahoma, a massive online charter school, has been charged by various government authorities with different crimes in recent years. The owners-operators of Epic Charter Schools have been charged with embezzlement, money laundering, computer crimes, and conspiracy to defraud the state. Such crimes have been widespread in the entire charter school sector for three decades. Equally noteworthy is the fact that under Oklahoma law charter school teachers do not have be certified to teach.

Currently, there are more than 60 privately-operated charter schools in Oklahoma. About 3.8 million students (7.4% of U.S. children) are currently enrolled in nearly 8,000 charter schools across the country.

The inescapable law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism, especially since the mid-1970s, continues to coerce capital-centered forces to privatize as much of the public sector and social programs as they can in order to maximize profits and avoid extinction. Capitalist economies everywhere are in deep trouble and are becoming more reckless in their narrow quest to maximize profits as fast as possible. Greed is at an all-time high.

Capital-centered forces will continue to restructure the state apparatus to advance their retrogressive agenda under the banner of high ideals. This includes raiding the public education sector and privatizing it in the name of “serving the kids,” “empowering parents,” “promoting competition,” and “increasing choice.” So far, “school-choice” schemes have made some individuals very rich while lowering the level of education and harming the public interest.

Charter schools represent the commodification of education, the privatization and marketization of a modern human responsibility in order to enrich a handful of private interests. The typical consequences of privatization in every sector include higher costs, less transparency, reduced quality of service, greater instability, more inefficiency, and loss of public voice. Whether it is vouchers, so-called “Education Savings Accounts,” or privately-operated charter schools, education privatization (“school-choice”) has not solved any problems, it has only multiplied them. [2]

Charter schools are not public schools. If privately-operated charter schools wish to exist and operate they must do so without public money. Public funds belong only to the public and must be used solely for public purposes. This means guaranteeing a range of services, programs, and institutions that continually raise living and working standards. It means serving the common good at the highest level and blocking any schemes that undermine this direction.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The right to exclude is “one of the most treasured” rights of property ownership.

[2] See The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (2023).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

As the earliest Category 5 storm ever observed in the Atlantic carves a path of destruction through the Caribbean, we get an update on damage from Hurricane Beryl from the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, where the storm hit Tuesday. He describes the disaster scenes he witnessed and discusses the rising challenge of extreme weather fueled by the climate crisis. “The developed countries, the major emitters, are not taking this matter seriously,” says Gonsalves. He says the world must dramatically reduce emissions and that the current political and economic system is “driving all of us towards, if not extinction, to a terrible, inhospitable place called Earth.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

After attacking Dr. Jill Stein, St. Louis police charged her with assaulting them. Stein is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Green Party. On April 27 she spoke at a program of the Green Party of St. Louis and then went to support student protesters at Washington University. There, she was arrested along with Green Party campaign managers Jason Call and Kelly Merrill with about 100 others.

As students peacefully gathered in tents and on the lawn, they were soon confronted by police from four departments: University City, Richmond Heights, St. Louis City and St. Louis County. When Stein arrived at the campus, students asked her to help defuse an already tense situation.

She identified herself to onlooking university administrators as a Green Party Presidential candidate. Stein, along with St. Louis Aldermanic President Megan Green and Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, attempted to persuade university administrators to let students stay. Police moved to block the conversation. A reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who attempted a discussion with university vice-chancellor Julie Hail Flory was ordered to leave the campus.

Merrill and Stein looked for a restroom and found all doors locked, but a student was able to unlock one door. Hearing yelling that the police were about to attack, they quickly went outside. They walked into the space between students and police, pleading for calm. But the police stormed in.

Merrill reported that “This was the first time I understood why so many police are on bicycles. They picked them up and used them as weapons to push people down.” When police began assailing protesters, they targeted Stein first and did not bother the two Democratic Party officials. They threw Stein on her head, threw Merrill to the ground, jumped on Call, and dozens became their victims.

Students were charged with trespassing and disruptive behavior. Those who were arrested have been prohibited from re-entering campus even if they will miss final examinations and not graduate. The administration-police reaction followed a pattern at universities across the US as if it had been scripted in Joe Biden’s office.

Being assaulted, arrested and jailed was only the beginning of Stein’s ordeal. Not being told what would happen to her, Stein sat alone in a cell for hours before being released. Exhausted, she did not make it to our house to sleep until 3:00 in the morning.

On Monday morning, April 29 Stein took a break from her mid-states tour to get checked out at University Hospital in Columbia MO. They found that, though very bruised, her rib was not broken; and she continued to Kansas City.

Bob Suberi is a Jewish member of the St. Louis Green Party who has made several solidarity visits to the West Bank. He brings back stories of the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberately provoking Palestinians in order to have an excuse for over-reacting, sometimes with a massive raid. Similarly, Washington University students committed the trivial infraction of occupying space regularly used for events such as carnivals and this became the excuse for a police invasion.

The similarities between practices in Palestine and on US campuses is unmistakable. This is true not only for intolerance of dissent and brutality. It is also the case with the way Israelis destroy sanitary facilities in Gaza, leaving people with nowhere to relieve themselves except on sidewalks. This serves both to humiliate Palestinians and create a health crisis.

The mounting opposition to Israel’s war is reflected by the wide variety of speakers at the St. Louis Green Party event: Andrew de las Alas (Asians Demanding Justice), Saish Satyal (College Democrats), Lila Steinbach (Jewish Students for Palestine), Bahar Bastani MD (Dar al-Zahra Mosque and Education Center), Shahab Mushtaq (Green Party of St. Louis), Bob Suberi (Veterans For Peace), Chibu Asonye (Green Party of Illinois), Zaki Baruti (Universal African Peoples Organization) and Omali Yeshitela (African People’s Socialist Party).

Jewish herself, Stein insists that “The students are not the villains in this struggle against Israeli violence. They are in fact the heroes, defending the right of free speech and to peacefully protest. Many already see the villains being the Washington University administration, those who conspired with them to destroy free speech, and the Biden gang whose fingerprints are all over efforts to shut down peace initiatives. Out of one side of his mouth Biden claims he is working to end the killing and maiming of Palestinians. From the other side of his mouth comes the push for billions of war dollars that are causing the genocide.”

Dr. Stein joined tens of thousands of students in campuses across the US who are demanding university divestment from Boeing and other companies that manufacture weapons used by Israel. Students presented Washington University with five demands:

University officials told the press that they felt that they had to take action because the demonstrators “had the potential to get out of control and become dangerous.” Apparently skilled at ignoring the obvious, these officials have never noticed that the corporate behavior of their partner, Boeing, has vastly exceeded the “potential” to become dangerous.

One of the great ironies of the episode is that above the April 28 Post-Dispatch story which described events at Washington University was another front page story reporting that Boeing was abandoning efforts to outsource much of its work. It approvingly announced that this would save 550 St. Louis jobs.

Of course, the Post-Dispatch has not published stories regarding the creation of peace-related jobs for Boeing employees if the war-manufacturer were to be downsized. Also worthy of note is the fact that no Boeing executive or government official working with them has been arrested for crimes against humanity, complicity with genocide or any other charge. Maybe they would have to peacefully sit in a tent on the Washington University campus to get busted.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Fitz.

The Iranian government "bears responsibility" for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.

The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police."

It said the mission found the "physical violence in custody led to Ms. Amini’s unlawful death.... On that basis, the state bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”

Amini was arrested in Tehran on September 13, 2022, while visiting the Iranian capital with her family. She was detained by Iran's so-called "morality police" for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, or hair-covering head scarf. Within hours of her detention, she was hospitalized in a coma and died on September 16.

Her family has denied that Amini suffered from a preexisting health condition that may have contributed to her death, as claimed by the Iranian authorities, and her father has cited eyewitnesses as saying she was beaten while en route to a detention facility.

The fact-finding report said the action “emphasizes the arbitrary character of Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, which were based on laws and policies governing the mandatory hijab, which fundamentally discriminate against women and girls and are not permissible under international human rights law."

"Those laws and policies violate the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and the autonomy of women and girls. Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, preceding her death in custody, constituted a violation of her right to liberty of person,” it said.

The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran hailed the findings and said they represented clear signs of "crimes against humanity."

“The Islamic republic’s violent repression of peaceful dissent and severe discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been confirmed as constituting nothing short of crimes against humanity,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the center.

“The government’s brutal crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests has seen a litany of atrocities that include extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. These violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, women, children, and minority groups,” he added.

The report also said the Iranian government failed to “comply with its duty” to investigate the woman’s death promptly.

“Most notably, judicial harassment and intimidation were aimed at her family in order to silence them and preempt them from seeking legal redress. Some family members faced arbitrary arrest, while the family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbaht, and three journalists, Niloofar Hamedi, Elahe Mohammadi, and Nazila Maroufian, who reported on Ms. Amini’s death were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to imprisonment,” it added.

Amini's death sparked mass protests, beginning in her home town of Saghez, then spreading around the country, and ultimately posed one of the biggest threats to Iran's clerical establishment since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. At least 500 people were reported killed in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.

The UN report said "violations and crimes" under international law committed in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom protests include "extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.

“The violent repression of peaceful protests and pervasive institutional discrimination against women and girls has led to serious human rights violations by the government of Iran, many amounting to crimes against humanity," the report said.

The UN mission acknowledged that some state security forces were killed and injured during the demonstrations, but said it found that the majority of protests were peaceful.

The mission stems from the UN Human Rights Council's mandate to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran on November 24, 2022, to investigate alleged human rights violations in Iran related to the protests that followed Amini's death.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

The Iranian government "bears responsibility" for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.

The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police."

It said the mission found the "physical violence in custody led to Ms. Amini’s unlawful death.... On that basis, the state bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”

Amini was arrested in Tehran on September 13, 2022, while visiting the Iranian capital with her family. She was detained by Iran's so-called "morality police" for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, or hair-covering head scarf. Within hours of her detention, she was hospitalized in a coma and died on September 16.

Her family has denied that Amini suffered from a preexisting health condition that may have contributed to her death, as claimed by the Iranian authorities, and her father has cited eyewitnesses as saying she was beaten while en route to a detention facility.

The fact-finding report said the action “emphasizes the arbitrary character of Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, which were based on laws and policies governing the mandatory hijab, which fundamentally discriminate against women and girls and are not permissible under international human rights law."

"Those laws and policies violate the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and the autonomy of women and girls. Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, preceding her death in custody, constituted a violation of her right to liberty of person,” it said.

The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran hailed the findings and said they represented clear signs of "crimes against humanity."

“The Islamic republic’s violent repression of peaceful dissent and severe discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been confirmed as constituting nothing short of crimes against humanity,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the center.

“The government’s brutal crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests has seen a litany of atrocities that include extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. These violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, women, children, and minority groups,” he added.

The report also said the Iranian government failed to “comply with its duty” to investigate the woman’s death promptly.

“Most notably, judicial harassment and intimidation were aimed at her family in order to silence them and preempt them from seeking legal redress. Some family members faced arbitrary arrest, while the family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbaht, and three journalists, Niloofar Hamedi, Elahe Mohammadi, and Nazila Maroufian, who reported on Ms. Amini’s death were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to imprisonment,” it added.

Amini's death sparked mass protests, beginning in her home town of Saghez, then spreading around the country, and ultimately posed one of the biggest threats to Iran's clerical establishment since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. At least 500 people were reported killed in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.

The UN report said "violations and crimes" under international law committed in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom protests include "extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.

“The violent repression of peaceful protests and pervasive institutional discrimination against women and girls has led to serious human rights violations by the government of Iran, many amounting to crimes against humanity," the report said.

The UN mission acknowledged that some state security forces were killed and injured during the demonstrations, but said it found that the majority of protests were peaceful.

The mission stems from the UN Human Rights Council's mandate to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran on November 24, 2022, to investigate alleged human rights violations in Iran related to the protests that followed Amini's death.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Robert Tracy’s appointment as St. Louis’ police chief came with a sweetener: In addition to a $175,000 annual salary from the city, a nonprofit organization made up of local business leaders pays him $100,000 a year more.

The arrangement raised some questions at the time about whether the St. Louis Police Foundation’s money would influence Tracy’s approach to policing in a city with one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime.

Thirteen months after Tracy took charge, those questions remain largely unanswered.

Megan Green, president of the board of aldermen and the city’s second-highest ranking official, said that while Tracy is generally responsive to the board, aldermen need more information about the financial relationship between the foundation and the Police Department and will now ask for it.

“I think we don’t know the exact extent to which he collaborates with the foundation or they have his ears,” Green said. “The public deserves to understand exactly, even beyond salary, how much money the police foundation is investing in the Police Department.”

Sharon Tyus, a longtime alderwoman who represents some north side neighborhoods most affected by crime, questioned whether Tracy’s arrangement with the foundation is legal.

“Who else can pay the chief?” she asked. “Can the criminals get together and pay the chief?”

Since it was founded in 2007, the foundation has given the Police Department at least $20 million in support, including both cash donations and in-kind gifts of training, weapons, protective gear and technology.

But until Tracy’s hiring, it had never paid a public official; the deal with Tracy, policing experts say, is unheard of for a U.S. police chief. (It’s far more common for coaches at elite college athletic programs.)

Tracy, who previously was the chief of police in Wilmington, Delaware, was the first chief in the St. Louis department’s 214-year history to be selected from outside the department. Mayor Tishaura O. Jones announced his appointment after a nationwide search with help from a firm whose work was paid for by another St. Louis-area business group, the Regional Business Council. Jones has praised Tracy for the city’s reduction in reports of violent crime in his first year on the job, while Tracy has credited the work of the department’s officers, community support and his own crime reduction strategies.

Tracy and Jones did not respond to questions from ProPublica or requests for interviews. Nick Dunne, a spokesperson for Jones, said in an email that the mayor has been “continuously transparent” about the selection process and Tracy’s salary.

“It remains clear that Chief Tracy is a worthwhile investment in the safety of St. Louis residents,” Dunne said.

Tracy assumed his role just a few months after ProPublica published stories focusing on the growth of private police forces in St. Louis. Those stories revealed that wealthier neighborhoods paid private companies for additional police services provided by moonlighting city officers and high-ranking leaders.

After the stories’ publication, Jones said in a radio interview that she intended to make changes to the private policing system to eliminate the disparities. But Tracy’s appointment has only cemented the city’s pay-to-play policing environment; the promised overhaul has not taken place. In a recent interview with KSDK-TV, Tracy said he didn’t want to prevent his officers from earning additional money in second jobs.

Experts in policing and public administration criticized private funding of Tracy’s salary. They said the foundation’s money threatens to divide Tracy’s civic loyalties or at least create the impression that he’s beholden to wealthy donors.

“When you have what could be perceived as a very high-level pay-to-play scheme, where certain businesses and entities have not just the chief’s phone number but literally sign more than a third of his paycheck, that’s just a bad look,” said Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s law school who has studied private policing.

Money from police foundations is used in a number of cities and in a variety of ways, from funding officer appreciation days to providing helicopters. They bridge budget gaps and provide resources that might otherwise be unavailable because of public funding limitations. Their supporters say they enhance what police can do and can foster partnerships between the community and the police.

But, Stoughton said, that kind of spending is “significantly different from giving a police chief a private stipend, particularly one that constitutes a substantial portion of his public salary. That’s weird.”

Justin Marlowe, a research professor at University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the director for the school’s Center for Municipal Finance, said it was clear “something is wrong with the way St. Louis is budgeting for policing.” If it was important to pay the chief $100,000 more, he said, “then you find a way to do that through the budget process. And then that way it’s very clear where the accountability is and clear what the performance expectations are.”

Marlowe noted that public officials are expected to recuse themselves from votes or actions in which they have a financial interest to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. While taxpayers and the foundation might share objectives, “What we’re worried about is, What if there’s not alignment?”

In public statements to the media, Tracy has said he is not beholden to the foundation. The foundation’s chairman, Doug Albrecht, has told reporters that the foundation’s only condition for Tracy was that he remain engaged with the community and with officers.

But in his first year on the job, the foundation played a role in financing Tracy’s downtown crime strategy, contributing $860,000 for additional patrols in the business district, an area that had seen spikes in crime and raucous parties that turned violent. The foundation said this funding was at Tracy’s request. And Tracy told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he chose downtown for foundation-funded patrols because it’s a popular gathering place. The program has been renewed this year.

In the email to ProPublica, Dunne, the mayor’s spokesperson, said the downtown patrols were “designed to incentivize officers to work secondary under the department itself, rather than private companies.”

Joe Vaccaro, the longtime chairman of the Board of Aldermen’s Public Safety Committee until he lost reelection last year, said that, if he were still on the board, he would ask why Tracy chose downtown for the foundation-funded patrols.

“Why are you picking downtown over my neighborhood?” he asked. “There are more killings in areas of north St. Louis. Why is downtown more important? Oh, wait a minute, the money comes from the group that’s paying you.”

Vaccaro’s successor as public safety chair, Bret Narayan, said the financial relationship between the foundation and Tracy “is something we should be taking a hard look at.” He said that though the board has not typically received line-item detail on foundation gifts to the department, some aldermen have been discussing legislation that would require the department to provide that.

In an interview, the foundation’s president and executive director, Michelle Craig, said that its relationship with Tracy is substantially the same as with his two predecessors — though neither of them received foundation money. She said board members “do not have any more access than anyone else who would call the chief’s office and make an appointment.”

Tracy’s predecessor, John Hayden, who served as police chief for 4 1/2 years until his retirement in June 2022, said the foundation did not try to influence his decisions. He said the department would sometimes ask the foundation to buy equipment instead of waiting for the next year’s city budget allocation. He said that when the department said it needed bulletproof helmets, the foundation bought them, citing an incident where an officer had been shot.

Hayden said he wished that he’d had the opportunity to try to negotiate a higher salary than the $153,000 he made in his last full year. But he said he would have preferred to be paid by the city.

“I think then the citizens would be more comfortable that I wasn’t beholden to somebody,” he said.

Lt. Col. Michael Sack, who served as interim chief for about six months in 2022 and was one of four finalists for the chief’s job, said in a federal lawsuit against the city that he would have turned down the extra pay from the foundation so St. Louis would not have a chief “who has conflicts of interest.” (Sack says he was wrongly rejected for the job; the city says that the lawsuit has no merit and has asked a federal judge to dismiss it.)

St. Louis does not appear to have a clear need for private funding of its chief. The department’s budget this year is $189 million and, because it is about 300 officers short of its authorized strength of 1,215, it has not spent all the money the city has made available. Last year, the department was more than $12 million under budget.

The private pay for Tracy is part of a broader pattern where St. Louis-area business leaders, many of whom live and work outside the city, have quietly tried to influence police operations because of concerns about crime’s impact on the regional economy.

Albrecht, the foundation chairman lives in Ladue, an affluent suburb 12 miles west of St. Louis known for sprawling estates and private golf clubs. That’s also where his venture capital and private equity firm, Bodley Group, is based. The foundation’s mailing address is his office. Albrecht didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At the time of Tracy’s hiring, Albrecht said the group learned during the search that the process was limited by the low pay for the position. The city charter requires that the police and fire chief be paid equally. Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson made $157,423 in 2022. He was paid $175,000 in 2023 after Tracy was hired.

Jenkerson said in a brief interview that he was “in the process of working on that issue” and that “parity is parity.” He said he did not want to comment on what he thought about Tracy’s foundation pay.

St. Louis ranks at the lower end for how it pays its chief — at least before Tracy. A survey by the Police Executive Research Forum found that, in 2021, the average salary for chiefs in the 38 largest U.S. police departments was $232,380.

The additional pay for the chief’s job was never part of publicly available information about it. And it’s not clear if the city considered paying the chief a higher salary, even if it meant paying the fire chief more. Green said she didn’t know if such a proposal was taken to the Board of Aldermen before she was elected its president in November 2022.

Her predecessor, Lewis Reed, resigned and is in federal prison on a bribery conviction.

Records the foundation provided to John Chasnoff, a local activist who has pressed for transparency over the city’s policing, show that its board members were discussing a plan to contribute to the next chief’s salary at least three months before Tracy’s selection. An email to board members from Albrecht said the city’s maximum salary of $175,000 “will not allow us to acquire the highest level of talent for this position.”

Albrecht wrote that to secure the contract of up to $100,000 with the new chief, the foundation would work directly with the search firm the city used and, ultimately, with the candidate. “The city would not be involved,” he wrote.

Minutes from a foundation board retreat in September 2022 indicate members agreed that this financial support was crucial to attract the most qualified candidate, even if they had no control over the process or the eventual appointee.

Tracy insisted in a KMOV-TV interview that he was not beholden to the foundation and that his integrity was intact because “that was a deal with the city, and not a deal to me personally.”

But that appears to not be true. A contract released by the foundation — after pressure from Chasnoff — shows that it was signed by Tracy and Albrecht.

Besides salary, the contract requires Tracy to conduct a series of outreach efforts, including town hall meetings with department staff, regular communications and updates to the community by a blog or other means, and annual meetings with leaders in each of the city’s 14 wards.

The agreement runs for three years or unless Tracy is fired by the city or the foundation has probable cause that he has committed misconduct or failed to uphold the agreement.

Craig said the foundation was pleased with Tracy’s performance.

“I’m not in the media, so I don’t know the struggles of getting his attention,” she said, “but to us it appears he’s in a lot of places in the community, and that’s what he’s supposed to be doing.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jordan Smith.

Speaking on January 11 in Riga on the last stop of a tour of the Baltic states, he added that the situation on the front line is "very complicated" and again said that Ukrainian forces lack weapons.

Zelenskiy told reporters that after the election in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to win another term in office Russia will undertake military action on a larger scale.

He said later on X, formerly Twitter, that he met with Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina in Riga and discussed "further military aid to Ukraine and tangible actions to advance Ukraine’s path to EU and NATO membership."

Speaking earlier in Estonia, Zelenskiy rejected the possibility of a cease-fire with Russia, saying it would not lead to substantive progress in the war and only favor Moscow by giving it time to boost supplies to its military as the conflict nears its two-year anniversary.

“A pause on the Ukrainian battlefield will not mean a pause in the war,” the Ukrainian leader said in Estonia's capital, Tallinn, on January 11 during a tour of the three Baltic nations.

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"Give Russia two to three years and it will simply run us over. We wouldn't take that risk.... There will be no pauses in favor of Russia," he said. "A pause would play into [Russia’s] hands.... It might crush us afterward.”

Zelenskiy has pleaded with Ukraine's allies to keep supplying it with weapons amid signs of donor fatigue in some countries and as Russia turns to countries such as Iran and North Korea for munitions.

NATO allies meeting in Brussels on January 10 tried to allay Kyiv's concerns over supplies, saying they will continue to provide Ukraine with major military, economic, and humanitarian aid. NATO allies have outlined plans to provide "billions of euros of further capabilities" in 2024 to Ukraine, the alliance said in a statement.

But in Washington, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said U.S. assistance for Ukraine has "ground to a halt," though lawmakers continue negotiating a deal that would tie the release of the aid to U.S. border security.

Meanwhile, Latvia and Estonia announced aid packages during Zelenskiy's visits to their capitals.

Latvia will provide Ukraine with a new package of military aid, President Edgars Rinkevics said after meeting with Zelenskiy in Riga.

"Today I informed the president of Ukraine about the next package of aid, which includes howitzers, ammunition, anti-tank weapons, antiaircraft missiles, mortars, all-terrain vehicles, hand grenades, helicopters, drones, generators, means of communication, equipment," Rinkevics said, speaking at a joint press conference with Zelenskiy.

Estonian President Alar Karis said earlier after his meeting with Zelenskiy that his country will provide 1.2 billion euros ($1.31 billion) in aid to Ukraine until 2027.

"Ukraine needs more and better weapons," Karis said at a joint news conference with Zelenskiy.

"The capabilities of the EU military industry must be increased so that Ukraine gets what it needs, not tomorrow, but today. We should not place any restrictions on the supply of weapons to Ukraine," he added.

Ukraine has been subjected to several massive waves of Russian missile and drone strikes since the start of the year that have caused civilian deaths and material damage.

In the latest such attack, a hotel in downtown Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, was struck by Russian missiles overnight on January 11. The strike injured 13 people, including Turkish journalists staying at the hotel, Kharkiv regional police chief Volodymyr Tymoshko said.

A Russian missile attack struck a hotel in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, late on January 10, wounding 11 people, according to local authorities.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian military said on January 11 that 56 combat clashes took place at the front during the day. The operational situation in the northern directions did not change significantly, and the formation of Russian offensive groups was not detected.

With reporting by AFP and Reuters

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Claus is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation:

Santa:  I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.

Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.

Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?

Santa: I’ve already told you…

(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho… That was naughty.

Soviet Police: We found a list of names.

Santa: Ah my list.

Soviet Police: These are American spies?

Santa: No, no…

Soviet Police: There was also a second list.

Santa: Oh you don’t want to be on that list.

Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.

Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing…

Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.

“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”

Soviet Police: This is clearly code.

Santa: No it’s not code.

Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?

Santa: That’s me.

Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.

Santa: Yes, I’m known by very many names.

Soviet Police: So you are spy?… How do you know my children’s names?… What are you doing in Russia?

Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.

Soviet Police: Presents? For who?

Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.

Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?

Santa: Well, nothing.

Soviet Police: Nothing? So…You are communist?

Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?

Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”

This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.

Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.

While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”

Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.

The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.

The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

KTVI-TV photojournalist Brian Ledford and reporter Andy Banker were shot at with pellet gun munitions while reporting in St. Louis, Missouri, on Nov. 20, 2023. Ledford was not hit, and Banker was not seriously injured. A suspect has since been arrested on charges of assault.

Banker reported for KTVI that he was standing on a residential street in South St. Louis at around 12:45 p.m., using his phone to send an email, when a car drove past.

“Photographer Brian Ledford and I first heard the rapid fire, then saw what appeared to be gel-blaster-style guns made for airsoft games,” he said. “There were male teens firing pellets directly at us from the front and rear passenger seats.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

KTVI-TV reporter Andy Banker was shot by a pellet gun while reporting in St. Louis, Missouri, on Nov. 20, 2023. Banker was not seriously injured and a suspect has since been arrested on charges of assault.

Banker reported for KTVI that he was standing on a residential street in South St. Louis at around 12:45 p.m., using his phone to send an email, when a car drove past.

“Photographer Brian Ledford and I first heard the rapid fire, then saw what appeared to be gel-blaster-style guns made for airsoft games,” he said. “There were male teens firing pellets directly at us from the front and rear passenger seats.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The post Echoes of the SS St. Louis Today appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Derek Royden.

A Missouri judge on May 23, 2023, barred the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and one of its reporters from publishing details from the mental health evaluation of a man set to stand trial for allegedly killing a police officer in 2020.

Post-Dispatch reporter Katie Kull obtained a copy of a mental health report on the defendant, Thomas J. Kinworthy Jr., when it was filed in St. Louis City Circuit Court on May 18. According to court filings reviewed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, two copies of the report were filed by mistake, with one incorrectly made available to the public.

Kull contacted the public defender representing Kinworthy for comment on May 22, the Riverfront Times reported, and the attorney immediately filed a request for a temporary restraining order. The following day, Judge Elizabeth Hogan granted the order, barring Kull, the Post-Dispatch and any of its employees from publishing about the report.

In a tweet, Kull wrote, “I tried to write a story but instead I found myself under a court order.”

On May 23, the Post-Dispatch filed an initial response to the order, asking that it be dissolved and noting that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected such orders when the documents were legally obtained.

“This is true even when statutes prohibit dissemination of such information, as is the case here,” attorneys for the Post-Dispatch wrote. “It is also true when information is inadvertently released that should not have been released, which is the apparent situation here.”

Neither Kull nor the Post-Dispatch responded to requests for comment.

Freedom of the Press Foundation, which oversees the operation of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, condemned the prior restraint.

“On the rare occasion when the government has a legitimate basis to withhold records from the public, the onus is on the government, not the press, to ensure that they’re withheld,” Advocacy Director Seth Stern wrote. “That’s why the Court has held at least four times that once the government releases records to the press, even accidentally, it cannot claw them back or prohibit or punish their publication, regardless of how sensitive the records may be.”

The restraining order will remain in place as the case progresses, according to the Times, and the Post-Dispatch has until June 12 to submit motions in opposition.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

At this moment, Russia is more isolated from the West than it has ever been, quite possibly in history. As just one example, while V.I. Lenin was able to famously travel from Finland via train to St. Petersburg, even during the height of WWI, the train from Finland to Russia ceased operating after February 24 of 2022. And indeed, it was through Finland that we decided to travel to Russia, simply because there are now very limited ways to travel there. Thus, while for years, even during the Cold War, one could easily fly directly from the US to Russia on Aeroflot and other airlines, that is no longer possible due to sanctions. Now, one can only fly there through Serbia, Turkey or the UAE, but those flights are quite expensive.

And so, we ended up choosing to fly to Helsinki, Finland and have a Russian friend who has a non-Russian passport (Russians with only Russian passports cannot travel to Finland) drive from St. Petersburg to pick us up. This turned out to be more easily said than done as our friend’s car broke down at the Finnish/Russian border. And so, we took a very expensive, three-hour cab ride to the border, met up with our friend and crammed ourselves into the cab of a tow truck to drive the remaining three hours to St. Petersburg – a quite inauspicious beginning to our journey.

Saint Petersburg streets are busy from early morning til late at night. This photo taken at 11:30pm

St. Petersburg (Leningrad)

Our first several days were spent in St. Petersburg, formerly “Leningrad.” We stayed strategically at the Best Western in Uprising Square – so named by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 to commemorate the Great October Revolution of 1917. In the Square is located the Moscow train station which we used to great effect during our journey, as well as the Leningrad Hero-City Obelisk. The Obelisk commemorates Leningrad’s designation as one of 13 “hero cities” in the Soviet Union which distinguished themselves for their exceptional sacrifices in resisting the Nazis during WWII. Two other cities we visited on our trip (Moscow and Sevastopol, Crimea) are also honored with this designation, as is Kiev, Ukraine and of course Volgograd (formerly “Stalingrad”).

During our stay, the city of St. Petersburg sure seemed more like Leningrad, for it was beginning to be decked out in red flags with hammers and sickles and stars to commemorate both May Day and Victory Day over the Nazis on May 9. We were told by long-time residents that the ubiquitous display of such symbols of the USSR was something new (at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), and was spurred on by Russia’s Special Military Operations beginning in February of 2022. It appears that the Russian people, and the Russian government as well, are looking to the legacy of the Soviet Union as a source of strength, pride and unity during this time of war – a war that they view, we believe quite rightly, was forced on them.

The newly released Russian Federation “concept” on foreign policy states quite explicitly that Russia’s current foreign policy is informed by the two main objectives and successes of the USSR – the defeat of Nazism and global decolonization. Certainly, on paper at least, this belies the claim of some Western leftists that Russia is motivated in its relations with other nations by imperialist concerns.

Dan takes his turn playing guitar on St Petersburg street at 11 pm

While in St. Petersburg, we visited the site of the terrorist attack which claimed the life of Russian journalist Vladlen Tatarsky and wounded over 30 others, at least 10 gravely. The attack involved the bombing of a cafe in the picturesque University district of St. Petersburg along the Neva – a soft target if there ever was one. The cafe remains closed, and three sets of memorials for Tatarsky are set up around it, consisting of flowers and photos. Of course, the Western press has tried to do everything it can to justify this vicious attack upon civilians, writing off Tatarsky as “pro-Kremlin” and “pro-war” (as if the Western press can’t be fairly characterized as “pro-war” and “pro-Pentagon”) and simply glossing over the numerous other civilians wounded in the assault as collateral damage.

Rick and Dan at the site where Russian journalist was killed

Moscow

As planned, we left St. Petersburg by train to Moscow after several days. We took the faster “Sapsan” (Falcon) train to Leningrad Station in Moscow (it is still called that). The train ride, reaching 120 mph, was smooth and comfortable. We sat across from two Russian women, one of whom was quite friendly. She told us of her son who lives in Boston and who, quite sadly for her, she hasn’t seen in years. She kept sliding over hard candy to share with us. And, when she saw Dan nervously biting his nails, she kindly handed him her nail filer for him to use. This type of sharing on the train is quite common in Russia as we would continue to discover on our journey.

Rick with train compartment companions

Moscow too was being decorated for the May 9 Victory Day celebration. Red Square was sealed off from the public to prepare for the event, and the city was on high alert for possible terrorist attacks, one of which would come while we were in Russia with the drone attack upon the Kremlin itself. Despite the fears of attack, Muscovites were out on the streets day and night. Both Moscow and St. Petersburg were incredibly vibrant – much more so than our cities back home which are still feeling the effects of the lockdowns during the pandemic. Gorky Park was particularly lively with throngs of families with children enjoying the spring weather, swings and slides. Colorful tulips were in full bloom.

From appearances, Russia largely did not appear to be a country at war. However, everyone we talked to confided in us about their concerns for the war – for the loss of life on both sides, the fact that it was lasting much longer than people had expected, and the danger that the war could expand into a greater conflagration. Some Russians expressed their fear that nuclear weapons would end up being used before this was all over, though they believed that the US would be the first to launch them. At the same time, the Russians showed their usual stoicism in the face of such dangers, with one family with whom Dan had dinner stating almost matter-of-factly that “Russia has always had difficult times, and it will have them again.”

After several days in Moscow, and our hopes for visiting the Donbass falling through, we took the long, 27-hour train ride to Crimea – a region now fully in the crosshairs of the proxy war.

Arriving in Crimea

Ukrainian President Zelensky says he will “take back” Crimea. US leaders Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan say they support him. Indeed, Sullivan recently suggested Ukraine is free to use the F-16 fighter jets in attempting to “recapture” Crimea.” We traveled to Crimea to see the situation and learn details of how and why Crimea seceded from Ukraine in 2014.

A highlight of the train ride was passing over the new 12-mile long Kerch Strait bridge which connects mainland Russia to the Crimean peninsula. As our train approached the bridge, we could see that saboteurs had been active. There was a fuel tank on fire in the near distance. A couple passengers did not want us to photograph this, probably thinking it gives publicity to the enemy.

As we departed the train in Crimea at the beautiful station in the Capitol city, Simferopol, the loudspeakers on the platform greeted us with traditional Russian songs.

We then drove the roughly two hours to Yalta where we stayed while in Crimea. Along our drive, we saw the giant mosque which the Russian government is building along the highway in an area where Tatars, who generally practice the Islamic faith, protested to have land to live and worship. The Tatars had been persecuted during WWII as suspected collaborators and forcibly removed from Crimea to other Soviet Republics.

A number of Tatars have moved back to Crimea over the years and now make up about 12 percent of the population of Crimea. Meanwhile, about 65 percent of the Crimean population is ethnic Russian and about 15 percent is Ukrainian, though about 82 percent of the population overall speaks Russian on a daily basis.

As we were told while in Crimea, one of the first things President Putin did after Crimea returned to Russia in 2014 was to try to make good relations with the Tatar community by “rehabilitating” them from the claims of collaboration made by Stalin government, giving them the land they protested for, providing them with modest monetary reparations and building them the new Mosque.

Historical Background

All in all, we spent five days seeing the sights and meeting people in the capital Simferopol, Sevastopopol and Yalta. We were guided by translator and native Crimean Tanya. In the past, Tanya worked for US Aid for International Development (USAID), teaching Russian to US Peace Corps volunteers.

Crimea has a rich agricultural sector. It was severely hampered after Ukraine dammed the canal bringing fresh water from the Dnieper River. After Russian forces intervened, they removed the dam and agriculture is once again thriving. Crimean cities are busy with the streets and sidewalks full. In the parks, there are teens skate boarding and seniors playing chess.

The situation in Crimea is emblematic of the Ukraine crisis overall. In both Crimea and the Donbass (eastern Ukraine), the majority of people are ethnically Russian, their native language is Russian and they voted overwhelmingly for the elected but overthrown President Yanukovich.

From the 15th century Crimea was part of the Ottoman Empire. It became part of the Russian Empire in 1783 after the army of Catherine the Great defeated the Turks.

In 1921, Crimea became the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.

In 1954, Soviet Premier Khrushchev designated Crimea to be part of the Ukraine republic. This was done without consulting the Crimean people but it was not a major change since they were all part of one country, the Soviet Union. As we were told in Crimea, “Nobody could imagine the Soviet Union breaking up.”

As the Soviet Union was breaking up, Crimeans held a referendum in January of 1991. They voted overwhelmingly (94% in favor) to become the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea” and to separate from Ukraine. There was contention with Kiev and ultimately it was agreed that Crimea would be autonomous but within Ukraine. There was desire but not the urgency to secede from Ukraine at this point.

The desire to separate from Ukraine became more urgent in late 2013 and early 2014 as Crimeans watched with alarm as Russophobic ultra-nationalist and neo-nazi groups increasingly dominated violent protests in Kiev’s Maidan plaza. The book To Go One’s Own Way documents how the Crimean parliament and presidency issued statements, pleas and warnings about the threat to Ukrainian unity beginning in November 2013.

As we discuss in an upcoming article, the government of Ukraine reacted to the Crimean referendum to reunite with Russia quite punitively, and it continues to punish the Crimeans for their decision. At the same time, Russia has actively invested in the peninsula and made major improvements in the overall infrastructure there. In light of the foregoing, it is safe to say there are relatively few Crimeans who ever wish to return to Ukraine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Kovalik and Rick Sterling.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, a reform-minded prosecutor who was first elected in 2016 and again by an overwhelming majority in 2020, announced Thursday that she would resign following threats from the Missouri state legislature to pass a bill stripping her office of power.

Missouri Republicans ramped up efforts this week to advance the bill, which would allow the governor to appoint a special prosecutor in any jurisdiction to handle cases said to include a “threat to public safety.”

Dozens of similar preemption bills filed in recent years target reform-minded prosecutors across the country. At least 17 states have tried to pass similar measures since 2017, soon after reform prosecutors started winning elections.

“This is not unique to Kim Gardner,” said Jill Habig, founder and president of the Public Rights Project, a civil rights nonprofit that has tracked the growing number of preemption bills. “What we’re seeing across the country is state-level overreach and resistance to reform.”

“They were losing at the ballot box.”

Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx poses for a portrait at the Zhou B Arts Center in Chicago, on March 10, 2022.

Photo: Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

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“For the entirety of her tenure she was constantly being scrutinized, criticized, and marginalized in a way that felt very unprecedented.”

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“Circuit Attorney Gardner was elected and then reelected by an overwhelming majority of her constituents, and the coordinated efforts to remove her threaten our democracy.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

The post The State of Our So-Called Free Press: A Panel Discussion from St. Mary’s College appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Citing newly released data from the New York State Comptroller, IPS noted that the average Wall Street bonus has increased by 1,165% since 1985, not adjusted for inflation.

Last year, the average cash bonus paid to Wall Street employees was $176,700—75% higher than in 2008 but slightly lower than the 2021 level of $240,400.

The federal minimum wage, meanwhile, has been completely stagnant since 2009, when it was bumped up to $7.25 from $5.15. While many states and localities have approved substantial pay increases in recent years, 20 states have kept their hourly wage floors at the federal minimum.

Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at IPS and the author of the new analysis, wrote Thursday that "average weekly earnings for all U.S. private sector workers increased by only 54.4%" between 2008 and 2022—a significantly slower pace than inequality-fueling Wall Street bonuses.

"The total bonus pool for 190,800 New York City-based Wall Street employees in 2022 was $33.7 billion—enough to pay for 771,520 jobs that pay $15 per hour with benefits for a year," Anderson observed. "Wall Street bonuses come on top of base salaries, which averaged $516,560 for New York securities industry employees in 2021."

Anderson argued that there are a number of straightforward steps lawmakers and regulators can take to curb exorbitant Wall Street compensation and bonuses.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed several provisions aimed at reining in bankers' compensation as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

But as The American Prospect's David Dayen pointed out last week, "bank regulators hip-pocketed one of those rules that Congress mandated in 2010—the one that would prohibit banker compensation that is specifically tied to taking inappropriate risks."

"The last time there was even a proposed rule on this was nearly seven years ago," Dayen continued. "And in 2018, when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was asked whether he would abide by Congress' wishes and finish the rule, he blandly replied, 'We tried for many years' and 'we were not able to achieve consensus'—just thumbing his nose at a congressional mandate."

Anderson urged the Biden administration's financial regulators to stop deferring to Wall Street lobbyists and "swiftly—and rigorously—enact the Dodd-Frank Wall Street pay restrictions that were supposed to have been enacted by May 2011."

Any new regulation, Anderson wrote, can and should include "a ban on stock options at Wall Street banks" and mandates requiring Wall Street executives to "set aside significant compensation for 10 years to pay potential misconduct fines."

"If such a regulation had been in place before the [Silicon Valley Bank] collapse," Anderson noted, "top executives would've automatically forfeited this deferred pay to help cover the cost of their recklessness."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Police in St. Louis, Missouri, are working to wrest control of their department from the city’s progressive mayor and put it in the hands of the Republican governor.

Law enforcement unions argue that local control has “put politics in policing” and that state oversight would help address an increase in homicides and a drop in police morale and staffing levels. They have rallied around Senate Bill 78, which would reinstate a Civil War-era system of state control overturned by Missouri voters in 2012 — and make St. Louis one of the only major cities in the country without authority over its own police force. The attempt by the Missouri Legislature to strip power away from city officials is a “slap in the face” to constituents in St. Louis, Mayor Tishaura Jones said.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Police in St. Louis, Missouri, are working to wrest control of their department from the city’s progressive mayor and put it in the hands of the Republican governor.

Law enforcement unions argue that local control has “put politics in policing” and that state oversight would help address an increase in homicides and a drop in police morale and staffing levels. They have rallied around Senate Bill 78, which would reinstate a Civil War-era system of state control overturned by Missouri voters in 2012 — and make St. Louis one of the only major cities in the country without authority over its own police force. The attempt by the Missouri Legislature to strip power away from city officials is a “slap in the face” to constituents in St. Louis, Mayor Tishaura Jones said.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

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Three months after a St. Louis public safety official said the city planned to review how off-duty police officers are used by private companies to patrol some neighborhoods, city officials said they had identified a consultant to do the work but were still looking for a way to pay for it.

The pledge to review police moonlighting came in September, after ProPublica revealed how the use of private police forces in St. Louis exacerbates disparities in how the city is protected. Deputy Public Safety Director Heather Taylor, responding to ProPublica’s findings, said the city would hire a consultant to study the issue.

Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said more recently that she intends to make changes to the private policing system to eliminate the disparities. “The well-heeled few, or those who pay extra taxes, shouldn’t get extra protection,” Jones said in a St. Louis Public Radio interview this month. “We all pay taxes in order to make sure that we get equal protection from our police department.”

The police department could be set for an overhaul with Jones’ appointment last week of its first chief from outside the agency in its 214-year history. Robert Tracy, the chief in Wilmington, Delaware, will start Jan. 9.

Tracy could not be reached; Jones and Taylor did not respond to requests for comment. But Monte Chambers, a program manager for the Public Safety Department, said the city planned to hire a consultant who is already working on another project for the city to review other policing issues, including the city’s private policing system.

The review would begin “once I have found a funding source,” Chambers said in an email last week.

Chambers did not respond to additional questions seeking details about the review.

While the publicly funded St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department struggles to deploy officers in visible roles across the city, ProPublica found that about 200 of them work part time for the city’s biggest private policing firm in some of the wealthier and predominantly white neighborhoods.

Unlike in other places where officers moonlight in security roles, St. Louis officers wear their city police uniforms and can investigate crimes, stop pedestrians or vehicles, and make arrests while working for private policing companies.

The investigation found that city employees working as private police officers were sometimes offered monetary rewards for working on specific cases and that St. Louis’ largest policing firm, The City’s Finest, employs many of the department’s highest ranking officers, including four of the six district commanders.

Some of those commanders sometimes work on trivial matters for their private clients while the police department struggles to deploy officers to parts of the city grappling with violent crime.

Jones, elected in 2021, has criticized policing in St. Louis as “inefficient and ineffective” and, in the radio interview, lamented that private policing makes the city stand out for its disparities. She has talked about restructuring the department and shifting funding to programs that try to prevent crime, such as mental health services and job training initiatives.

Megan Green, who in November was elected president of the city’s Board of Aldermen and is the city’s second-highest ranking official, said private policing was an issue that the new chief “needs to take up pretty quickly.” She also said the Board of Aldermen should examine the source of funding for private policing: the neighborhood taxing districts that raise millions of dollars a year.

Many affluent city neighborhoods have created taxing districts, the latest formed this summer in south-side Holly Hills. The districts are authorized by state law, but they periodically need to be renewed by property owners and the city. Green said the board could try to determine if “there are some taxing districts that need to be dissolved.”

“I think that the special taxing districts definitely create inequities in our city,” Green said. She said the city should “be more strategic about where special taxing districts are created. We historically have not had a lot of strategies around that as a city, which I think has created even greater inequities.”

The Board of Aldermen’s Public Safety Committee had planned to talk about private policing during a meeting last week, but officials from the city’s Public Safety Department did not show up and the discussion wasn’t held.

Eliminating private policing could potentially roil the city. Luke Reynolds, chair of a taxing district in the city’s Soulard neighborhood that raises about $300,000 a year for private policing, said that if city police officers were barred from working for the private company that patrols his area, the neighborhood would look at other ways to enhance public safety. “I have no idea what that would look like,” he said.

“I have said all along that I don’t necessarily think the system is really necessarily fair. But then again, there is a lot of inequity in the world, unfortunately,” said Reynolds, who owns a bar in Soulard. “We’re going to try to make our neighborhood as safe as we can within the system that exists.”

Don Bellon, who owns a wrecking and salvage business and serves on a board that hires private police in the Grove entertainment district near the city’s central corridor, said paying for policing was necessary “because the city can’t provide it.”

But he said he was frustrated with a lack of accountability for private officers. At a recent Grove board meeting, he questioned what the private officers were doing on a night when several crimes were committed.

“There’s really no oversight on them,” he said. “They’re freelancing. They just decide where to go.”

Charles “Rob” Betts, who owns The City’s Finest, did not respond to a request for comment. Betts has called his company “essentially an extension of the police department” for neighborhoods who want to hire more police. And he has defended giving officers rewards for working on specific cases as not unlike an officer being recognized for good police work at a luncheon.

In reporting on policing in St. Louis this year, ProPublica showed that police and neighborhood advocates have sought court orders to banish individuals from large sections of the city and officers have enforced those mandates through arrests — a practice legal experts said few cities have taken to such extremes. Representatives for the mayor did not respond to requests for comment.

In a partnership with APM Reports this year, ProPublica also found St. Louis had massaged its murder totals in a way that may have violated FBI crime reporting guidelines and created false optimism about police performance. The city quietly lowered its murder counts for 2020 and 2021 by classifying more than three dozen killings as justifiable homicides — deaths not included in the city’s murder count. Neither the department nor representatives for Jones responded to requests for comment for the story.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler.

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Inside the Enterprise Center, the St. Louis Blues hockey team was losing a home game to the Edmonton Oilers. Outside, a man named Alvin Cooper was lying on a venting grate on a 38-degree night.

A St. Louis police sergeant asked him to move, according to an officer’s December 2018 report. Cooper refused. The sergeant and the officer pointed to signs that said “No Trespassing” and “No Panhandling.” Cooper said, “I ain’t going nowhere.” The officers tried to handcuff Cooper, one of them using “nerve pressure points on his jaw and behind his ear,” the other delivering “several knee thrusts” to Cooper’s right leg.

The officers arrested Cooper and booked him on charges of trespassing and resisting arrest. Two weeks later, a city prosecutor dropped the resisting arrest charge, while Cooper pleaded guilty to trespassing and signed an agreement offered to him by the prosecutor saying that as a condition of his probation, he would stay out of downtown St. Louis for a year.

The neighborhood order of protection, as the agreement is called, meant that Cooper could be arrested if he so much as set foot inside a 1.2-square-mile area — more than 100 city blocks — that is home to many of the organizations that provide shelter, meals and care to St. Louis’ homeless people.

Other American cities order people to stay away from specific individuals or places, and some have set up defined areas that are off-limits to people convicted of drug or prostitution charges. But few have taken the practice to St. Louis’ extreme, particularly as a response to petty incidents, according to experts in law enforcement.

Seattle and some of its suburbs, including Everett, have blocked off certain areas of their cities as “exclusion zones” where people who have been convicted of drug or prostitution offenses can be arrested. The practice has long been criticized by civil rights advocates, but city leaders say it has helped reduce crime.

Cincinnati once barred people convicted of drug offenses from its own “exclusion zones.” But a court struck down the practice as a violation of the constitutional freedoms of association and movement, and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 let that ruling stand. The Chicago suburb of Elgin adopted rules in 2016 that ban people who have repeatedly caused nuisances from some sections of the city, but it has been enforced sparingly.

In St. Louis, neighborhood orders of protection affect large swaths of the city and are typically in effect for a year or two, although some orders have had expiration dates in 2099, according to records obtained by ProPublica. A person who violates an order may face a fine of up to $500 or be sentenced to as long as 90 days in jail.

Victor St. John, an assistant professor of criminology at Saint Louis University, said even limited bans may have a dire impact “in terms of individuals not being able to engage with family members or friends.”

“It’s a restriction on resources that are publicly available to everyone else,” he said, adding, “I haven’t heard of entire neighborhoods.”

Yet just how rare the practice is across the country is difficult to assess, in large part because it has not been closely tracked. University of Washington professors Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, who have studied Seattle’s efforts, said in their 2009 book, “Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America,” that banishment is “rarely debated publicly” and that cities’ tactics are “largely deployed without much fanfare.”

“I think part of the problem is that these legal tools are very much under the radar,” Beckett said.

When neighborhood orders of protection are employed in St. Louis, critics say that they are too often used against people with mental health issues or who may be homeless, and that banishing an individual from a large section of the city may violate their civil rights. They say the orders fail to address the underlying problems contributing to their behavior.

Instead, they simply move problems from one part of the city to another.

The ACLU of Missouri said that it had explored a lawsuit to challenge the practice a decade ago but eventually did not because the organization did not have enough information and did not have consistent contact with a potential plaintiff.

“City courts violate the constitutional rights of Missourians when they issue broad, arbitrary banishment orders untied to any legitimate governmental purpose,” the group said in a statement. “The fact that such orders are used against people who have committed harmless, petty crimes only makes plain that the orders are about inconveniencing the vulnerable, and not about public safety.”

Some people have been barred from multiple neighborhoods. Some have been arrested for violating their bans multiple times within a few days.

“It reeks of redlining,” said Mary Fox, the longtime lead public defender in St. Louis who now heads the state’s public defender system. “It reeks of everything that happened before the Civil Rights Act went through — just allowing them to keep certain people out of their neighborhoods.”

Neighborhood orders of protection are another way policing in St. Louis is employed on behalf of the wealthy and against those most vulnerable. A ProPublica investigation showed how residents of affluent city neighborhoods hire private policing companies to patrol public spaces and protect their homes and busineses, creating dramatic disparities in how local law enforcement is provided.

Private policing and neighborhood orders of protection often go hand in hand, with private police officers doing much of the work to enforce the orders, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The city’s Municipal Court paused issuing neighborhood orders of protection at the start of the pandemic — not because of any policy change but because the process requires the defendant to appear in court and city courts are closed to in-person proceedings.

But police have issued citations for violations of the orders as recently as July 2021, records show. Some defendants also face active court cases for alleged violations. Moreover, a city ordinance authorizing the orders remains in effect, and St. Louis police are under orders to collect evidence that can help prosecutors pursue orders of protection.

St. Louis Municipal Administrative Judge Newton McCoy said in an email that defendants may be subject to neighborhood orders of protection “on a case by case basis” as a condition of probation “if they repeatedly commit offenses in certain neighborhoods.” He said court officials are “working to determine next steps for when all in-person municipal court hearings will resume.”

The banishments require the consent of the defendant, but some lawyers question whether defendants really have any choice but to sign. In one instance, a man was arrested for trespassing while gathering on a city sidewalk with friends across the street from a downtown homeless shelter. He agreed to stay out of downtown but was subsequently arrested for a violation and served three months in jail, a case highlighted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“I don’t think the actual terms of the neighborhood order of protection were clear to my client,” said Maureen Hanlon, an attorney for the public-interest law group ArchCity Defenders. “It states that he consented to it, but he was unrepresented at the time.” She entered the case after his incarceration for violating the order, “which, on paper, he agreed to, but in reality, I really question whether or not someone can agree to an order like that without counsel.”

ProPublica was not able to determine how many neighborhood orders of protection have been issued over the past two decades. Court cases are typically sealed after the successful completion of probation. It was also unclear if any remained in effect.

Megan Green, who on Nov. 8 was elected president of the city’s Board of Aldermen and is the city’s second-highest ranking official, said she has long heard from advocates for the homeless who say the orders make it difficult for the city’s most vulnerable people to receive meals or other services.

Green said she wants to study the use of neighborhood orders of protection to “understand the implications. And if we need to take a look at a revision, I think, potentially do that.”

“If you are banning somebody from downtown from the area where services are, that makes it that much harder to address the needs,” Green added. She said she also found it problematic that “if you’re just banning somebody from a certain area, and never addressing the behavior, chances are that behavior just moves to another block or another neighborhood.

“So I’m not sure how effective something like this is at achieving what folks are going for, either.”

Neighborhood leaders and police officials have defended neighborhood orders of protection as a tool for residents and businesses to make their streets safer by sending a message to criminals that they are not welcome.

St. Louis police Sgt. Charles Wall said the department merely enforces the orders once they’re issued.

Jim Whyte, who manages a private policing initiative in the city’s upscale Central West End, said neighborhood orders of protection are “used all over the city to kind of address these very problematic people.”

Whyte said that the orders were sometimes difficult to enforce. “If the person was involved in panhandling or a crime incident, I’d call the prosecutor and say, ‘Hey, this guy was down here Thursday violating the order.’” Whyte said that the prosecutor would ask if there was an arrest and he would say “like, ‘No, there weren’t any police around.’”

In those cases, Whyte said, prosecutors would not support charging the person with a violation.

Cooper could not be reached for comment. His mother, Karen Johnson, said her son, now 39, has suffered from schizophrenia since graduating from high school. His use of prescription medication, she said, led to reliance on street drugs and a life that spiraled into homelessness. During his ban from downtown, he moved out of the city and stayed with a family member in suburban Cool Valley. The court’s action to ban her son from downtown was “wrong,” his mother said. “That’s where he was getting a lot of help — the downtown area.”

This fall, she said, he was shot and wounded in an assault while he was living in a hotel.

The impetus for neighborhood orders of protection is murky. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen in 2003 unanimously passed the ordinance laying out penalties for violating orders, but it’s not clear if they existed before. Three of the bill’s four living sponsors — Jay Ozier, Dionne Flowers and James Shrewsbury — said they do not remember what prompted the measure. The fourth, Craig Schmid, could not be reached. None remain on the board.

“Particularly if you’re talking about it in terms of panhandling or something like that, I don’t see how I could have been in favor of it,” said Ozier, who served from 2002 to 2003.

The language in the ordinance suggests it was aimed at drug offenders. “Whereas, the illegal distribution, possession, sale and manufacture of controlled substances continues to plague our neighborhoods,” it reads. But in practice, the police in St. Louis have used the orders of protection more broadly.

To obtain an order, a representative for a neighborhood must document that a person who has been arrested has repeatedly caused trouble there. A prosecutor can use this statement as part of the neighborhood’s request for the order of protection. The prosecutor can then offer the agreement to the defendant, typically in exchange for dropping one or more charges against them.

The text of the order — with specific boundaries of the banishment area — is then added to a St. Louis-area criminal justice database, which can be accessed only by police and court officials. When police officers run the name of a person who has been issued an order of protection, the database will alert the officers.

For several years, neighborhood leaders viewed the orders as a tool for taking back their streets — sending criminals a message that they are not welcome. In 2014, for instance, about 50 residents of the city’s Tower Grove South neighborhood successfully petitioned a Circuit Court judge to order a carjacking suspect to stay away as a condition of release. “The show of solidarity from the residents of Tower Grove South played an important part in the positive outcome of today's hearing,” the neighborhood’s website boasted. “Congratulations TGS!”

As late as 2015, the website for the city’s top prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, featured a page where residents could view the names and photos of people who had been banished under neighborhood orders of protection.

The circuit courts, which handle misdemeanors and felonies, have not issued a neighborhood order of protection at least since progressive prosecutor Kimberly M. Gardner succeeded Joyce in 2017. But the practice has persisted in Municipal Court, where defendants face infractions, typically do not have lawyers and cases receive little public scrutiny.

Some cases can linger for years, as police repeatedly seek and enforce neighborhood orders of protection against the same people with little evidence that the orders are effective. In a report in 2017, a St. Louis police officer wrote that he was working for the department’s downtown bike unit and trying to combat a “rise in quality of life violations” downtown. He said a motorist complained about homeless people outside the city’s Dome, where the NFL’s Rams used to play.

One of the men the motorist pointed to was Gary Accardi, who the officer said was a “well-known panhandler,” according to his report. Accardi was holding a cardboard sign that said: “Homeless, Please help. God Bless.”

Four years earlier, in 2013, police had cited Accardi five times for violating a neighborhood order of protection, and he had spent 10 days in jail. As the officer approached, he wrote in his report, Accardi ran away yelling, “I don’t want to go to jail!” The officer wrote that he caught up with Accardi and put him on the ground to get him under control.

Accardi was charged with panhandling, resisting arrest and impeding traffic. Weeks later, Accardi agreed in municipal court to stay out of downtown St. Louis for one year.

Over the next few years, the order against Accardi was repeatedly extended and he was cited for violating it 17 times from July 27 to Oct. 17, 2018; on two occasions during that stretch he was cited twice in the same day.

In April 2019, while St. Louis Cardinals fans packed Busch Stadium downtown for opening day, police officers spotted Accardi outside the stadium and issued him a summons for violating the order.

The next day, Accardi was rifling through a trash can outside the stadium and another officer cited him yet again for the violation.

Stephanie Lummus, a lawyer who has represented Accardi in some of his cases, said a judge in 2020 declared him incapacitated and placed him under a guardianship. The guardian, she said, ordered her not to speak on his behalf.

Lummus said she frequently appears in municipal court on behalf of clients with cases on the court’s mental health docket — a special court day designed to match vulnerable people with services that can help them.

“I would sit there and wait for my client,” she said. “And I’d watch these people on the mental health docket sign these neighborhood orders of protection unrepresented, not knowing what the hell was going on. And I was just like, This is not the place for that, you know. These people are on the mental health docket for a reason. Why are you doing this?”

In some St. Louis neighborhoods, private police companies have enforced neighborhood orders of protection. Minutes from a 2018 meeting of a downtown community improvement district indicate that a private policing contractor had pursued neighborhood orders of protection for 25 “persistent offenders.”

Officers working off-duty for The City’s Finest, St. Louis’ biggest private policing company, have enforced neighborhood orders of protection in the Central West End, emails show.

“Neighborhood orders of protection are legal and issued by the courts,” the firm’s owner, Charles “Rob” Betts, said in an email. “If you have an issue with it you should probably discuss such with the court system that issues them. Or better yet, talk to the residents and businesses that are severely affected by aggressive panhandling.”

Whyte’s office, which serves as a substation for The City’s Finest in the Central West End, had a bulletin board where the names of people with neighborhood orders of protection are posted. That way the private officers know whom to look for, emails obtained by ProPublica through a public record request show.

Whyte recalled the case of a woman with chronic drug problems who he said was a persistent panhandler in the Central West End and who had been accused of petty theft. Neighborhood leaders sought to banish her after she created repeated problems.

“We were seeking an order of protection against her because she didn’t live in the neighborhood, didn’t work in the neighborhood,” he said. “She had tallied up a number of incidents and police contacts.”

He said the neighborhood never sought the orders “as an immediate action, it was always used as kind of, ‘Well, we have no other choice.’”

In the fall of 2018, the clock had run out on neighborhood orders of protection against some people who had been banished from the Central West End. Whyte wrote to Richard Sykora, a lawyer for the city who was in charge of pursuing the orders in municipal court.

“Many of our NOP’s have expired and unfortunately many of our problem people have returned to the CWE area,” Whyte wrote, adding, “We would appreciate you looking into obtaining NOP’s on the following subjects.”

Whyte described one person as having “been observed buying narcotics” and another as having stolen a tip jar from a coffee shop. One was “mentally unstable” and “very disruptive at local businesses.” Another had repeatedly violated a previous neighborhood order of protection and, Whyte wrote, “continues to be a persistent panhandler.”

Yet another, Whyte wrote, had been working with an organization that offers behavioral health services but he “has resumed aggressively panhandling.”

Sykora wrote to Whyte a few days later saying he would seek new neighborhood orders of protection against most of the people Whyte had listed. In one case, Sykora told Whyte, the judge had made only half the neighborhood off-limits so the person could get to his job without breaking the law. Whyte told Sykora that he had checked with the employer and the defendant didn’t really work there. “Could we get the order modified?” he asked.

Sykora did not respond to a request for comment.

Whyte’s requests led to some of those people being banished again. They could be arrested on sight for setting foot in the 1.9-square-mile neighborhood. And some of them were.

Whyte said the neighborhood has sought orders for people that were “running amok in the Central West End neighborhood. They wouldn’t heed any other warnings by the police, they wouldn’t conform, their behavior was antisocial.”

“The reality is they don’t go to other neighborhoods” after being ordered to stay out of the Central West End, he said. “They don’t care about the order of protection.”

Whyte said that since in-person court hearings have stopped, the neighborhood had hired a homeless outreach coordinator to try to address vagrancy in the neighborhood.

One person the neighborhood has banished was Lorse Weatherspoon, a homeless man with a history of petty crimes. He was arrested in the Central West End in 2018 on suspicion of trespassing and burglary after a private policing company posted a $250 reward for his arrest. It isn’t clear what happened with those charges, but the city charged him with five violations of his ban from entering the neighborhood.

“Lorse Weatherspoon was responsible for a crime a night,” said Jim Dwyer, chairman of one of the Central West End business districts that hires private police.

Whyte said residents would send him surveillance video of prowlers, “And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s Lorse Weatherspoon trying to see if he can get a bike out of your garage or steal your lawn mower.’”

Neil Barron, Weatherspoon’s lawyer, said the order was a “blatantly unconstitutional violation of a person’s right to freely travel.”

“Think about all the money used on this,” he added. “Does it solve the problem? Does it make the community safer? Does it help Lorse Weatherspoon rehabilitate himself? No, it doesn’t.”

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler.

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Opponents of gun violence on Tuesday urged Americans to vote for Democratic candidates who support commonsense safety measures after law enforcement officials said that the 19-year-old gunman who killed a teacher and a 15-year-old student at a St. Louis high school was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and more than 600 rounds of ammunition.

"Republicans will tell you the solution is some more guns. On November 8, you need to tell them they're full of shit."

Orlando Harris entered Central Visual and Performing Arts High School on Monday and opened fire, killing sophomore Alexandria Bell and 61-year-old physical education teacher Jean Kuczka and wounding seven students. Police officers killed Harris, who graduated from the school last year, in an exchange of gunfire.

"This could have been much worse," St. Louis Police Commissioner Michael Sack said during a Tuesday news conference, noting that Harris was armed with almost a dozen 30-round high-capacity magazines.

Mom, teacher, and Democratic Minnesota House of Representatives candidate Erin Preese pointed out on social media that metal detectors, locks, and armed guards—the purported solutions routinely offered up by GOP lawmakers—failed to stop "yet another school shooting."

"We don't have to live this way," wrote Preese. "Vote for lawmakers who will stand up to the gun lobby. Our kids lives depend on it."

Preese also shared a message from Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, which is part of Everytown. Both groups advocate for enacting popular policies to help end the epidemic of gun violence plaguing communities across the United States.

"Republicans will tell you the solution is some more guns," Watts tweeted. "On November 8, you need to tell them they're full of shit," she added, referring to the pivotal midterm elections that will determine control of Congress in two weeks.

During Tuesday's press conference, Sack read a handwritten note in which Harris "lamented that he had no friends, no family, no girlfriend, and a life of isolation," The Associated Press reported. "In the note, he called it the 'perfect storm for a mass shooter.'"

The news outlet added that Sack "urged people to come forward when someone who appears to suffer from mental illness or distress begins 'speaking about purchasing firearms or causing harm to others.'"

While the U.S. is a highly atomized society, people in other countries also struggle with social isolation and depression but rarely carry out mass shootings. What sets the U.S. apart, experts have long argued, is that it is a nation awash in weapons designed to kill people quickly.

There are more guns than people in the U.S., and due to National Rifle Association-bankrolled Republicans' opposition to meaningful gun safety laws, it remains relatively easy for people to purchase firearms in many states.

In a Tuesday opinion piece, St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger wrote: "It's not okay that we know what the problem is—too many guns. And yet Republicans in Congress and the Missouri Legislature regularly stop any meaningful action to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill or, in the case of assault rifles, banning them altogether."

"It's not okay that after every school shooting—Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, St. Louis—we write the same narrative, with similar fact patterns, and nothing is ever done," wrote Messenger.

He continued:

After Uvalde, there was the slightest bit of progress, with Congress passing and President Joe Biden signing a gun safety bill that expanded background checks on 18- to-21-year-olds. It also added incentives for states to pass red flag laws and increased federal gun protections for domestic violence victims.

It was a step in the right direction. But here in Missouri, we have a Legislature that passed a law that seeks to exempt the state from federal gun regulations. [Democratic St. Louis Mayor Tishaura] Jones, who grieved with gun violence victims on Monday, filed a lawsuit to overturn that state gun nullification bill. The lawsuit is pending.

It's not okay that a city full of children who experience gun violence on a regular basis has to turn to the courts to stop lawmakers from passing laws that actually increase the possibility of gun violence in that city.

That's been the reality in Missouri since the 2007 repeal of a law requiring permits to purchase a handgun. Since then, legislators have regularly weakened gun safety laws. The result has been an increase in gun violence, leading to an additional 50-plus deaths a year in the state, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

As the AP reported, "Monday's school shooting was the 40th this year resulting in injuries or death, according to a tally by Education Week—the most in any year since it began tracking shootings in 2018."

According to tracking by Everytown, however, "there have been more than 140 shootings on school grounds so far in 2022—each one preventable."

This year's deadly attacks include the May massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered by an 18-year-old man wielding an AR-15. Monday's shooting in St. Louis happened on the same day a Michigan teenager pleaded guilty to terrorism and first-degree murder charges stemming from a school shooting that killed four students in November 2021.

Studies have shown that gun regulations with high levels of public support, including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, help reduce the number and severity of fatal mass shootings.

"Going to school shouldn't be a life or death experience," tweeted Students Demand Action. Their counterparts at Moms Demand Action, meanwhile, insisted that the nation can do a better job of protecting children from gun violence and urged voters to "elect leaders who will put their safety first."

Guns recently became the leading cause of death among children and teens in the U.S.

"No other high-income country lets children be traumatized, wounded, and killed with guns over and over again," Everytown noted Monday. "Our gun violence crisis is preventable, but it will take all of us to end it."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

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There was a flurry of debates on news channels regarding the change. Back in 2001, the flag of the Indian Navy had also been changed during the tenure of the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and the colonial emblem of St. George’s Cross was removed. The flag was again changed in 2004 and the St. George’s Cross was brought back. News channels and BJP leaders blamed the Congress, including the UPA government and the then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh for the change. It was claimed that the flag was revised after the change of power in 2004 when the UPA government was at the Centre and Dr. Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister. BJP leaders accused the Congress party and Sonia Gandhi of bringing back the St George’s Cross on the Indian Navy flag because of their ‘attachment’ to the colonial symbol.

On August 30, anchor Shiv Aroor on India Today News Channel’s 5ive Live show claimed that Atal Bihari Vajpayee had removed the St. George’s Cross from the Navy’s flag in 2001, but in 2004, the UPA government brought it back. In the same show, Gaurav Sawant, managing editor and anchor of India Today channel made the same claim. In the beginning of the show, Shiv Aroor introduced Gaurav Sawant and stated that when the St George’s Cross was re-introduced in the Indian Navy flag back in 2004 under Manmohan Singh’s government, Sawant had first reported it. It is worth noting that Shiv Aroor is also the founder of Defence and Aerospace news website LiveFist.

On August 31, Aroor also claimed on India Today’s digital news video vertical NewsMO that the Manmohan Singh government brought back the St George’s Cross to the Indian Navy flag. India Today also tweeted a video of this. (Archived link)

On September 1, Aaj Tak news channel consulting editor and anchor Sudhir Chaudhary claimed in his show ‘Black and White’ that the St. George’s Cross was removed from the Indian Navy flag in 2001 under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. In 2004, when the UPA government came to power and Manmohan Singh became the Prime Minister, the St. George’s Cross was brought back on the Indian Navy flag.

On September 2, several BJP leaders and supporters targeted the Congress party and the UPA government, claiming that the Congress brought back the St. George’s Cross, a symbol of the colonial past, on the Indian Navy flag after Dr. Manmohan Singh became prime minister in 2004. Gave. BJP MP Tejashwi Surya, and BJP leader Tajinderpal Singh Bagga also tweeted the same claim.

Right wing influencer Anshul Saxena and BJP Goa tweeted the same claim as well. However, Saxena deleted the tweet later. (Archived link)

After this, media channels in their shows blamed Congress and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for bringing back the St. George’s Cross to the Indian Navy flag in 2004.

On Aaj Tak news channel, in anchor Chitra Tripathi’s show ‘Dangal’ on September 2, BJP spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia showed the printed copy of a graphic claiming that the St. George’s Cross was removed from the Indian Navy flag during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 2001. He then said that the Cross was brought back after the Congress came to power in 2004. After this, supporting the BJP spokesperson’s claim, the news anchor repeated that the Cross was re-introduced after Congress came to power, and asked Congress spokesperson Alok Sharma who loved the symbol so much that it had to be brought back?

On September 3, Rajat Sharma, editor-in-chief and chairman of India TV, claimed in his show ‘Aaj Ki Baat‘ that the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government had removed the British symbol (St. George’s Cross) in 2001. But in 2004, Manmohan Singh’s government came and brought it back.

Fact-check

Anchors of major TV news channels and BJP leaders claimed on TV that the Navy flag with the St. George’s Cross was brought back under the Manmohan Singh government. However, this is not true.

First, we used Google Advanced Search to collect documents related to the change in the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2001. We performed keyword searches on Google using the date and website filters. We found an archive from 2001 on the website of the Press Information Bureau (PIB), Government of India. According to this press release issued on August 8, 2001, on August 15, 2001, the St. George’s Cross was removed and a new mark was added on the Indian Navy flag. Using this information, we performed a keyword search on Google with the help of date and file filters. This led us to the original scanned copy of this press release on the Press Information Bureau (PIB) website. Both have been shown below.

Alt News examined the Lok Sabha website to gather more information. We found an Unstarred question which Thawar Chand Gehlot, the then Lok Sabha member from Shajapur, had asked the defence ministry. Gehlot inquired whether warships and submarines of the Indian Navy were still operating with the foreign flag with the St. George’s Cross on it, and if so, if the government had given them permission to change the said flags. The then defence minister George Fernandes responded on March 21, 2002, saying that all Indian Navy ships, submarines and shore installations carry the Indian Navy flag. The Indian Navy flag has been displayed on Indian Navy ships and submarines since January 26, 1950. This flag was white and divided into four parts by the Red Cross, and the Indian flag was on the left section. The new Indian Navy flag is affixed on Indian Navy ships, submarines and shore installations August 15, 2001 onwards.

Next, we performed a keyword search on Google with the date filter to gather more information about the change in the flag of the Indian Navy in 2004. We found a news report related to this published on the Rediff website on April 24, 2004. According to this news, on that day, the St George’s Cross was brought back on the flag of the Indian Navy. The reason for this was a complaint shared by the Indian Navy. It said that in the change in the flag in 2001, the St. George’s Cross was removed from the flag and a new mark was added. Due to its blue colour, the ocean and sky used to mix with the blue, and the flag was not visible from a distance. It is worth noting that on April 25, 2004, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister of India. Dr. Manmohan Singh took his oath as the Prime Minister on May 22, 2004.

To verify the information, we checked the archives of ‘The Hindu‘ newspaper dated April 24, 2004. Here, we also found information related to the change in the flag of the Indian Navy. We also got the news related to this published on April 24, 2004 in the Financial Express archives. This confirms that the flag was changed on April 25, 2004 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister of India.

We checked the website of Rajya Sabha for more details, and found an Unstarred question then Rajya Sabha MP Eknath K. Thakur had asked the defence ministry. He asked whether it was true that the Indian Navy wanted to adorn its ships, submarines and installations with new ensigns, flags and pendants, along with the reasons for this. The then defence minister Pranab Mukherjee replied on July 14, 2004 saying – “Yes, from April 25, 2004, the new emblem of the Indian Navy, distinctive flags and pennants have been introduced. The reason for the change in the flag was that the earlier flags had a combination of blue and white which was not clearly visible from a distance, especially at sea.” In other words, in 2004, when the Indian Navy’s flag was changed, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the prime minister.

To sum it up, the news channels of India Today, Aaj Tak, and India TV along with BJP leaders circulated a false claim. It was said that in 2001, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had removed the St. George’s Cross from the Indian Navy  flag, but when the UPA government came to power in 2004 and Manmohan Singh became the Prime Minister, he added the St. George’s Cross back on to it. In fact, both the changes in 2001 and 2004 happened during the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. 

In a fact-check article dated September 5, Aaj Tak also termed the claims made by these BJP leaders as false and wrote that this decision was taken only during the Vajpayee government. However, the channel did not mention that. Many of their own anchors amplified the false claim on television. This is not the first time Aaj Tak has spread fake news and later fact-checked the same.

The post News channels, BJP leaders’ claim that UPA got St. George’s Cross back on Navy flag is false appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

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The biggest private policing company in St. Louis is a who’s who of city police commanders, supervisors and lower-ranking officers.

Among the roughly 200 St. Louis police officers whose names appeared earlier this year on an internal list of officers who had sought and received approval from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to moonlight for The City’s Finest were four of the six district commanders who hold the rank of captain. The list, obtained by ProPublica through a public records request, also included two of the department’s highest-ranking officers, Maj. Ryan Cousins, who oversees the department’s murder, rape and arson investigations, and Maj. Shawn Dace, who oversees South Patrol, which includes two districts. It’s not clear if all of those officers currently work for The City’s Finest.

Dace and the four captains, through the department, declined to comment.

Many of the city’s wealthier — and predominantly white — neighborhoods hire off-duty city police officers from companies like The City’s Finest to supplement patrols by the department, an arrangement that creates disparities in how the city is protected. That many top officers moonlight for a private company that exists to shore up the department’s crime-fighting shortcomings suggests deep troubles, experts said.

Peter Joy, a professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said there would be less demand for The City’s Finest and other companies if the police department was more effective.

“If there was less crime in those areas, The City’s Finest would have less business,” said Joy, an expert in legal ethics and criminal justice. “So, there appears to me to be a conflict of interest.”

Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s law school who has studied moonlighting by police, said officers’ dual roles can lead to real and perceived conflicts of interest.

“If you do your job as a public officer too well, you’re going to put your security company out of business,” said Stoughton, a former police officer. “I’m not saying that’s actually going to happen. But it certainly creates this perception.

“The question in the public’s mind is: Who are you actually doing this for right now?”

Because the organizational chart at The City’s Finest is independent of the police department’s command structure, high-ranking officers on the police force sometimes must take direction from their departmental subordinates while working at The City’s Finest. The chief operating officer for The City’s Finest, for instance, is a city lieutenant, yet several higher ranking command officers are under him at the company.

“I’ve got commanders that work every day in different contract areas, and they're like some of the best officers out there,” said Charles “Rob” Betts, who owns The City’s Finest. “They do great, great work and they’re very professional. It’s a good thing, and I think it encourages the other officers that work there. When they see a commander working side by side, it builds morale.”

Betts said he likes to assign leadership roles in his company to commanders “because they’re already in a supervisory role and they understand the importance of that supervisory role.” But some lower ranking officers also have leadership positions. “I have some that I just like their work ethic and they do great work.”

Betts said he had never received a complaint about a commander working for his company.

“I haven’t seen any unethical behavior and I wouldn’t want to be part of it,” he said.

Nate Lindsey, a former official with a taxing district in the Dutchtown neighborhood in the south section of the city, said the department has a culture that views policing almost as a private enterprise.

“Private companies,” he said, “are setting the agenda for what law enforcement looks like in the city of St. Louis.”

Too many police commanders, Lindsey added, are “out there doing secondary gigs as opposed to, say, spending their evenings answering emails to people that they serve within their actual district.”

But Jay Schroeder, the president of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the police union, said the department’s command staff was, in his mind, simply trying to supplement incomes that lag behind those at other area departments. Police captains in St. Louis earn about $88,000 a year, while police captains in neighboring St. Louis County earn about $110,000, according to published payroll data.

Unlike patrol officers and sergeants, command officers in the city are not eligible for overtime. “These guys have tuition to pay and kids in college and all that stuff,” Schroeder said, “and they’re just trying to make ends meet like everybody else.”

Heather Taylor, the city’s deputy director of public safety, was making about $74,000 when she retired in 2020 as a sergeant after 20 years with the department. She makes about $99,000 in her new role, which she said she needed to shoulder heavy health care costs for her family.

“I couldn’t imagine right now being a sergeant and dealing with issues that I’m dealing with now with the pay that I was being paid,” she said. “I think that the story that probably will be missed within this story is why would any officers need to work secondaries as much as our officers work?”

The city declined to comment otherwise on the prevalence of police commanders working for private policing companies.

Some of the department’s highest-ranking officers sometimes spend their off hours performing tasks that their subordinates would typically do at their day jobs, essentially providing white-glove service to paying customers.

Documents obtained by ProPublica through an open records request show that Cousins sent emails to coordinate The City’s Finest’s response to such issues as a car abandoned on the street and a golf cart theft, trivial matters compared with the sorts of crimes he tries to solve for the police department.

At the time of the emails, Cousins was commander of South Patrol, an area that includes two of the city’s six police districts but does not include Soulard, where he worked for The City’s Finest as a project manager. It’s not clear who Cousins was on the clock for when he sent the emails. The department would not release data showing when he was working for the city.

Cousins said in an email that the department allowed him to work for a second employer and that his responsibilities for the company included scheduling officers for patrol, patrolling himself, attending Soulard meetings and advising officers for the company and the police department about ongoing crime issues.

He said that it was important to address even the smallest concerns residents bring because if they are left unaddressed they can lead to bigger problems. “Should I have allowed those concerns to languish and wait for someone to later address the issues instead of providing a timely response because it’s not as important as a robbery or a homicide?” he asked.

Capt. Michael Mueller served for more than four years as the commander of the department’s Fifth District, which straddles the Delmar Boulevard divide to include the upscale Central West End and several higher-crime neighborhoods to the north. That means he was responsible for making decisions about how to deploy resources across an area with massive disparities in wealth.

At the same time, he walked a foot patrol in the Central West End for The City’s Finest.

The neighborhood official who has managed Mueller’s patrols for The City’s Finest said that he doesn’t see any conflict. “He’s not working secondary for us because he’s the captain of a district,” said Jim Whyte, a retired city police officer who is executive director of the Central West End Neighborhood Security Initiative, which oversees The City’s Finest patrols. “We don’t care if we’re hiring a patrolman or a colonel; we’re hiring a police officer that has the powers of arrest that can enforce statutes and ordinances.”

On one occasion, in February 2020, Whyte — who is not a police department employee — suggested in an email that Mueller make an arrest in a trespassing case. A man had repeatedly gone into a cosmetics store in the Central West End where an employee had a restraining order against him. In an email to a police officer copied to Mueller, Whyte wrote: “I will pass that along to the secondary officers. Actually Captain Mueller will likely apprehend him quicker than anyone else.”

Whyte said that protecting the business and its employee from the trespassing suspect was important to the health of the neighborhood and “we don’t get the police response on trespassing.”

Mueller was recently transferred to another police district; he did not respond to a request for comment.

Stoughton, the law professor who has studied police moonlighting, said that a police officer who works as a privately hired officer in the same district where he is in command could have divided loyalties. As a commander, he might want to commit more of the police department’s resources to the area where he draws a second paycheck. But he also might want to hold back resources because his private employer’s business depends on a need for more policing there.

Campbell Security and Service Group, a smaller private policing company that competes with The City’s Finest for contracts, also employs senior command staff from the city. It works in a handful of neighborhoods.

Among the 60 city officers who have sought and been granted permission to work for Campbell are Sack, Bureau of Professional Standards commander Maj. Eric Larson and three district commanders. One of those district commanders, Capt. Christi Marks, said she had not worked for Campbell in about five years. The others, through the police department, declined to comment.

Corby Campbell, the company’s owner, said senior department officials on his payroll worked both as private patrol officers and as consultants. “It can be anything from just a simple question to an idea, like, ‘What do you think?’” he said. “There are no time frames, it could be nothing for a month or two and I might have something I want to run by them.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Hours after a burglary at a designer jeans store in St. Louis’ upscale Central West End neighborhood, at least 16 city police officers received an email alert with surveillance photos of the car believed to belong to the suspects — and an offer of a reward of at least $1,000 for any officer able to locate it.

The email was not from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, the police force that employs them and that residents fund with their taxes. Instead, it was from a retired city police detective named Charles “Rob” Betts, who also employs them at his private company, The City’s Finest.

The City’s Finest is no mere security firm. With about 200 officers moonlighting for it, it’s the biggest of several private policing companies that some of St. Louis’ wealthier and predominantly white neighborhoods have hired to patrol public spaces and protect their homes and businesses.

These neighborhoods buy patrols from Betts’ firm and other private police companies because, they say, they do not get enough from a city police department that struggles to provide basic services.

Under department rules, officers have the same authority when working for these companies that they have while on duty, one reason their services are in such demand. They can investigate crimes, stop pedestrians or vehicles and make arrests. And the police department requires that they wear their police uniforms when they’re working in law enforcement or security in the city, creating confusion about who they’re working for.

The result is two unequal levels of policing for St. Louis residents and businesses. Low-income and minority residents do not have the resources to hire police through a private company, and the department has struggled to provide patrols in parts of the city that suffer high rates of violent crime.

Meanwhile, the more affluent neighborhoods, which are less affected by violent crime, have raised millions of dollars to pay companies like The City’s Finest for granular attention from the same officers the police department has said it doesn’t have enough of. Officials in some of those areas praise The City’s Finest. They credit it with suppressing crime and helping merchants stay in business.

Dwinderlin Evans, a city alderwoman who represents some of the areas of St. Louis with the highest crime rates, including the neighborhoods of The Ville and Greater Ville, said the private policing system is unfair, “especially when you have neighborhoods that can’t afford to pay for extra policing.”

What’s more, The City’s Finest has raised its pay to exceed the department’s overtime rate — in essence outbidding the police department for its own workforce. Betts, in fact, has been clear that his company has to pay more to attract city police officers who might otherwise opt to work overtime.

The owner of The City’s Finest, Charles “Rob” Betts, told members of the Euclid South Community Improvement District on Sept. 16, 2021, that his company had raised its pay to compete with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.

Following questions from ProPublica, St. Louis Department of Public Safety Deputy Director Heather Taylor said the city planned a “complete review” of how off-duty officers are used and will hire a firm to “review for best practices that are going to be equitable to officers, the community and the city.”

Taylor acknowledged that, while working as a St. Louis police officer before retiring in 2020, she received an email offering a reward from The City’s Finest to work on a case. She said rewards for off-duty officers are “a practice we’re reviewing, that’s for sure.” ProPublica has identified four cases where The City’s Finest offered rewards.

Taylor said the bigger problem was low pay that makes secondary employment necessary. City police officers make a starting salary of $50,615, about 9% less than in neighboring St. Louis County and 13% less than in suburban Chesterfield.

Meanwhile, St. Louis Comptroller Darlene Green proposed boosting officer pay and benefits and bolstering community policing through a program called “Cops on the Block.”

St. Louis is far from the only U.S. city where neighborhood groups have hired off-duty officers. In Minneapolis, Atlanta, Kansas City and Dallas, neighborhood groups contract directly with local police departments or with the officers themselves. But in those cities, such patrols are typically managed by city officials and officers are accountable to department supervisors.

In other cities, such as Chicago, officers may work off-duty patrolling neighborhoods for private security companies, but they generally do not wear their police uniforms or represent themselves as police officers. The growing presence of off-duty officers in upscale Chicago neighborhoods has drawn concern from Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said she didn’t want “a circumstance where public safety is only available to the wealthy.”

She added, “That’s a terrible dynamic.”

Experts in policing said they had never seen a system like the one in St. Louis. That system is “an extreme example of a pattern that can be found all across the country,” said David Sklansky, a professor of criminal law and procedure at Stanford University. “Public policing, for all its problems — and it has many, many problems — does represent a commitment to protect people equally, not based on their wealth or political power,” he said. “So the privatization of policing represents a retreat from that promise.”

Even some officials in well-to-do neighborhoods acknowledge disparities the arrangement creates. “It’s kind of a screwed-up system,” said Luke Reynolds, chair of the special business district in the city’s Soulard neighborhood, known for hosting one of the nation’s biggest Mardi Gras celebrations.

Reynolds said that it was unfair that Soulard has “affluence compared to a lot of other neighborhoods and gets extra patrols. It’s kind of screwed up that the police department can’t do their job and doesn’t have enough people, yet they can staff secondary patrols.”

Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, interim Public Safety Director Dan Isom and interim Police Chief Michael Sack declined interview requests.

Public servants, including police officers, are generally prohibited from accepting gratuities or rewards. It is a felony in Missouri to offer a benefit to a public servant for any specific action they take in that role. The St. Louis police manual says officers cannot accept gratuities, rewards or compensation — unless they are for work outside the department.

While Missouri law does not address whether it is legal for an off-duty police officer to accept payments, courts in other states, including Oklahoma and Connecticut, have held that an off-duty officer accepting rewards or gratuities from private individuals for their actions within the jurisdiction that employs them runs contrary to public policy. In 1899, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it was against public policy for federal marshals to receive a private reward for capturing a fugitive, comparing it to extortion.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is a professor at the University of South Carolina law school and has studied police moonlighting, called emails from The City’s Finest offering private bounties “wild.”

“Officers used to get rewards like this,” he said, “but we’re talking 100 years ago.”

Betts said in an interview that he considers the practice “aboveboard” and not unlike an officer being recognized for good police work at a luncheon. He also compared it to Crime Stoppers, the anonymous crime tip lines that provide rewards for information — although police in Crime Stoppers’ St. Louis region cannot receive rewards.

“It’s merely just an incentive, to just pay a little more attention to this for a little bit. Everybody’s got their plates full,” Betts said. “Our job as police officers is to solve crime and there’s a lot of stuff that gets lost in the shuffle.”

He added: “Everybody works better when you incentivize them.”

St. Louis perennially has one of the nation’s highest rates of violent offenses among big cities, and, like most American cities, it has struggled to reign in crime. As a result, the performance of the police department is a point of almost constant conflict among city leaders. Some companies have even threatened to relocate because of crime.

The crime and violence, however, don’t occur evenly across the city. They are concentrated in the neighborhoods north of Delmar Boulevard, St. Louis’ well-known racial and socioeconomic dividing line. To the north of Delmar, nearly all of the residents are Black; more than half of residents south of Delmar are white. Home values south of Delmar are roughly seven times higher than those to the north, according to the city assessor.

Pockets of the north suffer from especially high rates of violent crime. In the city’s Sixth District, which contains about 35,000 residents in about 14 square miles, at least 76 murders were committed in 2020. That’s nearly as many as in the entire city of Minneapolis, a city of 430,000, and more than in Boston, with a population of 675,000, or Seattle, with a population of 735,000.

That same year, the Second District on the far south side of St. Louis, which has about 74,000 residents in 15 square miles, had just seven murders.

“It’s a crisis that we’re dealing with,” said Paul Simon, who owns a pet salon on the city’s north side. “Not only in the homes of the people that are in our community but the neighborhoods as well. We’re just in a desolate area. I can’t blame the police, because we have officers who are young and vibrant that are wanting to serve and protect, but the resources at the top” are not getting to struggling communities.

John Hayden, who served as chief from late 2017 until his retirement in June, said in public meetings that the department did not prioritize high-crime areas with its patrol plan. Instead, it deployed about the same number of officers to each of its six police districts. Those districts were drawn in 2014 to handle roughly equal volumes of calls for service — but without regard to the seriousness of the crimes.

Critics of the strategy said minor crimes are so pervasive in high-crime areas that victims typically do not bother to report them.

“If we prioritize them by violence, then some of you would have less officers in your districts, and some of you would have more,” Hayden told the aldermanic public safety committee in a videoconference in September 2020. “I think I would get a lot of resistance from some of the people that are on this call.”

Hayden said that day that he had tried to bridge the gap by supplementing patrols in the most violent areas with officers from specialized units. And he said that if he had more officers at his disposal, he would send them to areas with the highest violent crime rates, which “may not be something that everybody supports.”

The aldermanic committee advanced a measure that would have redrawn all six police districts and added a seventh to direct more officers to high-crime areas.

But Hayden told aldermen it was “not feasible” because the department would be spread too thin.

Hayden said in an interview that the ability of some neighborhoods to hire extra police while others cannot was simply “a matter of fact.”

Department leaders and the union that represents rank-and-file officers have for years portrayed the department as shorthanded, struggling to recruit and retain officers. Between 2015 and 2021, the department ran about 100 to 200 officers short of its authorized force of 1,340 officers.

Last year, Mayor Jones cut more than 100 unfilled positions. The department today has 1,053 officers, according to the Missouri Department of Public Safety. Even with job cuts, the force remains one of the largest in the nation per capita.

A longstanding complaint from neighborhood leaders is that officers are so busy responding to emergency calls that they seldom have time to engage with residents, build relationships in the community and act as a deterrent — to just be seen on the street.

Last October, about a dozen business owners in an area of the north side that includes the high-crime neighborhoods of Walnut Park East and Walnut Park West met at a restaurant with two St. Louis police officers. They expressed their frustration about the scarcity of patrols in their district. A reporter observed the meeting.

“We don’t even call you every time,” Tahany Jabbar, the chief operating officer of a chain of gas stations, told Sgt. Christopher Rumpsa and Lt. David Grove.

Rumpsa nodded and finished Jabbar’s thought: “You’d be calling all day.”

“To be honest, you guys don’t come,” Jabbar said. “No offense, but if someone’s not dying, you’re not coming.”

Rumpsa told Jabbar that when the city restructured its police districts in 2014, the Sixth District was meant to have 16 cars on the street at all times, but currently had far fewer.

“Patrol always has the least amount of resources,” Rumpsa said. “That’s the one thing they have got to change.”

ProPublica sought to observe The City’s Finest at work, after Betts suggested that a reporter ride along with some of his employees. The police department, however, blocked the request.

The department also blocked ProPublica’s access to data that would provide a picture of how the department deploys its officers. It declined to provide in-depth data on the activities of its patrol officers, which could have shown possible differences in how they respond in different neighborhoods.

But two groups of consultants did get access to that kind of information. Both concluded that the department does not put enough officers in high-crime neighborhoods.

Teneo Risk, led by Charles Ramsey, who has headed police forces in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., studied St. Louis’ police department in 2020 at the request of the area’s biggest publicly traded company, Centene. Teneo found the department lacked a comprehensive plan to address crime that left it “constantly in ‘fire-fighting’ mode,” leading to “persistent rates of crime and disorder.”

Its report said that in high-crime areas the department “finds itself chronically reactive to incoming calls for service, struggling to maintain sufficient numbers of officers on patrol, and lacking the resources to implement more community-based policing.”

Another group, Center for Policing Equity, studied the police department last year and found that while the department had “exceptional” response times to emergencies, officers in high-crime areas had little time for what is called proactive police work: deterring criminal activity with a visible police presence.

In two districts that lie mostly north of Delmar, the Center for Policing Equity found, officers were so backed up with calls they had little time for “a more comprehensive community-centered policing presence.” But in some areas with lower violent crime rates, the group said, the department was comparatively overstaffed.

Taylor, who retired from the police department as a sergeant in September 2020 and was hired as deputy public safety director after Jones became mayor in April 2021, said “a lot of things that we’re doing have changed” under Jones. She said the department has, in fact, sent more officers to work in areas struggling with high rates of violent crime.

Jay Schroeder, the president of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the police union, said some officers feel the department has too many officers working in administrative roles. As the department has lost officers, he said, it has left more vacant positions in the patrol division, creating even more demand for private policing.

“The patrol division should be the division that has the most people and the most resources going to it, and it doesn’t seem like it’s been the focus over the last nine to 10 years,” Schroeder said. “As crime goes up, aldermen want policemen in their neighborhoods and the only way it seems they can get it is to pay” private policing companies.

“They’re paying to have policemen in their neighborhoods. That’s what we’ve come to.”

The sign over The City’s Finest’s headquarters off a busy St. Louis street in the city’s central corridor features a single word: POLICE. Many of its vehicles also feature the word POLICE and a logo that incorporates the St. Louis police badge. Other vehicles say SECURITY.

When there has been confusion among residents over whether the officers driving these cars are working on behalf of the city’s police department or a private company, The City’s Finest has tried to avoid drawing a distinction between the two. Speaking about his company, Betts once said it was “essentially an extension of the police department.”

It took decades for this mindset to become commonplace in St. Louis. Some city and neighborhood leaders have concluded private policing is the only way to get policing.

Betts said in an interview that private policing “allows an officer to focus in one particular area for the entirety of their shift, which puts a consistent police presence in that neighborhood.” He added: “We kind of look at ourselves as a force multiplier to the police department, and it’s at no expense to the city.”

Betts has even talked about rolling out a system to allow residents in the neighborhoods The City’s Finest patrols to bypass the city’s 911 system to contact a company officer to report an incident or request an escort. His company would then locate the nearest officer, using a GPS app on the officers’ phones, and direct them to handle the call.

Betts told members of the Central West End North Special Business District on Sept. 17, 2021, that he wants to provide residents a direct number to his officers.

The city, according to financial statements and other records, has at least 15 districts that levy taxes to pay more than $2 million a year for private police patrols, which include most of the city’s central corridor and several prosperous residential areas on the south side. And more are signing on. The Holly Hills neighborhood, which has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the city, voted in August to create yet another taxing district, which would raise about $400,000 a year from a property tax surcharge and spend 30% of that for private police.

Steve Butz, a Democratic state representative who helped organize the Holly Hills ballot initiative, said he and his neighbors believe the city is “becoming ungovernable.”

“Is it fair?” Butz asked. “Is it fair that wealthier people drive nicer cars, have better homes, have home security systems, get better health care, go to better schools? People with less resources get the lower end of the stick.”

Private policing in St. Louis dates to the early 1990s and the theft of a Bob Marley box set from West End Wax, an independent record store in the Central West End. Tony Renner, who was then an employee of the store, recalled chasing the shoplifter down Euclid Avenue as the store’s owner, Pat Tentschert, fired shots at the thief.

Central West End resident Jim Dwyer said that Tentschert showed up at a neighborhood meeting one day soon afterwards, pounded her fist on a table and said that more needed to be done to make the neighborhood safe. (Tentschert died in 2017.) He said an alderman “whispered in my ear afterwards” that the neighborhood could form a special business district. “And we did.”

Residents from the area voted to form the Central West End North Special Business District in 1992. Their goal: improving neighborhood safety, including by hiring their own private police officers.

“There are people who are envious of the presumed wealth and privilege of our neighborhood in particular,” said Dwyer, who now serves as the district’s chair. But, he said, “we’re not abusing anything.”

Around the same time, Adam Strauss, whose father, Leon Strauss, had redeveloped thousands of homes in the DeBaliviere Place neighborhood next to the Central West End, founded Hi-Tech Security. The company dominated private policing until 2009, when the St. Louis Police Board stripped Adam Strauss of his city security license for engaging in an improper chase and using unnecessary force to arrest two people who had been suspected of trespassing on a gated Central West End street. Adam Strauss declined to comment.

Then-Police Chief Isom told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2009 he wanted the department to “have better control over where those services are and where those people are.” He added: “The idea would be there would be no middle person. So you would not have any private security company in the middle.”

But that never happened. Instead, private policing continued to grow. A new company — this one run by police officers — was starting to compete with Hi-Tech for neighborhood policing contracts. In 2007, Betts was a beat cop working in the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood near the Washington University medical campus. The university’s redevelopment arm was investing heavily to stabilize the surrounding area.

Some neighborhood leaders viewed the neighborhood’s stubborn crime and the presence of gangs as an obstacle to progress. According to Betts, Brooks Goedeker, who was then a community development specialist with the medical center, suggested that he add bike patrols conducted by St. Louis police officers. Goedeker did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Although Betts’ online resume says he has owned the company since July 2007, when he was still on the force, he has said over the years that his mother owned the company. Since at least 2006, the police department has prohibited members of the force from having a financial interest in or acting as officers or directors of a private security company. Betts said he had to form his company “in a certain way to ensure that things weren’t being violated.”

Betts retired as a homicide detective in 2013 after being injured in a traffic accident on duty.

Charles P. Nemeth, author of the book “Private Security and the Law” and the retired director of the Center of Private Security and Safety at John Jay College in New York, said rules regulating officers owning security companies are important because “private security firms may deal with a criminal case or other matter in a distinctively different way than public policing may be required to handle.”

Nemeth, now the director of the Center for Criminal Justice Law and Ethics at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, said officers in uniform working for private companies is “very troublesome” because it blurs the basis of their authority. “This is a new one to me, and I’ve been watching this a long time,” he said.

Indeed, nothing suggested that an officer patrolling a Central West End sidewalk on a recent evening was moonlighting for a private company. Lt. JD McCloskey, who works as an aide to the St. Louis police chief, acknowledged to a reporter that he was working for The City’s Finest, though he was wearing his police uniform. He said his responsibilities that evening were to maintain a visible presence along a stretch with several businesses and “interact with citizens and businesses.”

The private policing system puts law enforcement in the hands of interests that are not part of the city’s government and, as a result, are not accountable to taxpayers citywide.

The police department’s only oversight of private policing is screening employers of off-duty officers and auditing whether the officers work more than the maximum hours allowed: 32 hours a week total, or 16 hours a day including their eight-hour department shift. A state audit two years ago found the department didn’t adequately track moonlighting; since then, police have assigned officers to monitor the practice.

Officers on patrol for private police companies don’t necessarily go where crime is happening; they go where they’re paid to go. So it was that a burglary in the Central West End prompted a substantial reward offer from The City’s Finest and a search by several officers across St. Louis for the potential suspects.

The landlord of the burglarized jeans store was no ordinary resident. He was Sam Koplar, a prominent local developer. In addition to Koplar being a board member of one of the Central West End taxing districts that had hired The City’s Finest, his company separately hires officers from The City’s Finest to protect his properties in the Central West End.

Betts wrote in the email to officers that Koplar’s properties had been targeted by criminals three times in the previous year. He implored officers to “work any angle you deem appropriate” and even recruit fellow officers from an undercover task force to help find the car.

“Solving this case is very important to TCF and your help is much appreciated,” he wrote, using The City’s Finest’s initials. The email was sent to some of the officers’ department email addresses; among the recipients were two of the six St. Louis police district captains at that time.

One of those captains, Michael Deeba, who also worked for The City’s Finest at that time, responded from his department email with a key detail: the plate of the wanted car. Another officer emailed the group from his email address at The City’s Finest that a license plate reading camera had detected the car on a street several miles away. A short time later, a suspect was taken into custody at an address near where the car had been seen, although it’s not clear if anyone was prosecuted for the break-in. It was also not clear if any officer was given the reward money.

Deeba, who was charged in April with stealing for allegedly moonlighting for another company on police department time, said that “the whole department,” including its last three chiefs, knew of the rewards. But he said neither he “nor my people would take such a reward.” He has pleaded not guilty to the stealing charge. Deeba has said the department placed him on forced leave; the Missouri Department of Public Safety said he was no longer employed by the city.

Koplar said in an interview that he doesn’t like paying for additional policing, saying the police department should provide adequate patrols. “But unfortunately,” he said, “the police department is stretched very thin.” He said the repeated break-ins at his property were frustrating. “We were exasperated. Our job as the property owner is to provide a safe environment.”

Betts said in an interview that offering a reward was warranted because it brought attention to a crime that the police department might not have devoted the resources to solve. “That business, that area, was a very important part of the business district of the Central West End,” he said. “It was hit three times, which ultimately cost the Koplar family to lose their client, which was detrimental to their business. And nothing was being done.”

Betts said he does not know how often he offered rewards: “It wasn’t like I was doing that every day. It’s usually for a high-profile crime or something that’s of great importance to our efforts.”

ProPublica discovered the rewards by obtaining emails between the company and some members of the department through an open records request. Only emails copied to police department email accounts were subject to the records request.

In another case, after Betts emailed a group of city officers to offer $250 for the arrest of a suspected prowler, a detective sergeant for the department responded on his department email that a “wanted poster shall be created” for the suspect. The detective sergeant, Renwick Bovell, did not return requests for comment.

Mary Fox, director of the Missouri public defender system, said she had “real concerns with a private organization saying, ‘Hey, if you arrest this person, we’ll give you money,’ when there has not been a judicial determination that the person should be arrested. For a police officer to arrest someone without a warrant, they have to have reasonable suspicion that a crime occurred and this is the person who committed the crime. And it sounds like they are just taking the word of the organization that’s reaching out to them without any investigation by themselves or their department. That’s problematic.”

Nate Lindsey is a former official for a taxing district in Dutchtown, a south city neighborhood that struggles with crime. In 2018, Dutchtown neighborhood officials tried to hire The City's Finest but could not afford to. “Even if a poor neighborhood that lacks resources goes as far as to tax itself to attempt to bring better policing resources into the streets, it’s going to struggle if it doesn’t have enough money to compete with deeper-pocket interests,” he said.

For city residents, he said, “the expectation is that the police department is making decisions with the public good in mind as a whole and that process isn’t affected by special interests or the amount of money that can be provided to either individual officers or companies like The City’s Finest,” he added. “They’re not doing that now.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler.

Rep. Cori Bush sailed to a comfortable reelection Tuesday night, sending a message that St. Louis Democrats are happy with their nonconformist representative. Her victory marks a win for progressive incumbents in an election year that has seen them embattled by outside spending and little supported — if not outright opposed — by the party establishment. But progressives faltered statewide: In the open race for retiring Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt’s seat, populist-styled Lucas Kunce lost the primary to Trudy Busch Valentine, an heir to the Anheuser-Busch fortune.

“They don’t like the fact that we don’t accept any corporate money. They don’t like that I speak the way that I speak because I came from this community and I sound like my community. They don’t love the fact that, instead of being what they call dignified, I show up as a protestor, that I’ve been on the frontlines forever,” Bush told the crowd at her election-night speech. “But our work isn’t based on what they like. Our work is based on what folks need.”

A former nurse and activist, Bush gained prominence locally as the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets in 2014, after Ferguson police shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. Since her election to Congress in 2020, Bush has pursued a confrontational style of politics that has rallied activists but has often put her at odds with party leadership, becoming one of the only congressional Democrats willing to say “defund the police,” and bucking party leadership in a row over decoupling an infrastructure bill from a wider progressive agenda.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Austin Ahlman.

A regional medical center in St. Joseph, Missouri, subpoenaed St. Joseph News-Press reporter Clayton Anderson and a news director on June 2, 2022, after Anderson reported on an ongoing worker’s compensation lawsuit against the hospital.

On May 18, the News-Press published Anderson’s article on a discrimination and worker’s compensation lawsuit filed against Heartland Regional Medical Center, operating as Mosaic Life Care, by a former employee who sustained an injury while working as a medical technician and was later terminated from the hospital.

According to Kansas City NPR-affiliate KCUR, Anderson’s reporting referenced a spreadsheet showing the number of employees injured while working at the hospital and were later terminated or let go. A judge sanctioned Mosaic during the trial for discrepancies found in the spreadsheet.

In an email, Anderson told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that about two weeks after publishing the article he received a phone call from Mosaic Life Care asking for reporting materials and recorded interviews with sources. He said he declined to provide any information.

The hospital issued Anderson a subpoena for reporting materials and to sit for a deposition, arguing that Anderson and Steven Booher, the News-Press’ director of news content, received confidential information from the plaintiff’s lawyers. The law firm representing Mosaic Life Center did not respond to a request for comment.

In his deposition on June 14, Anderson answered questions about his motivation for reporting on the lawsuit. According to the transcript, reviewed by the Tracker, he denied having seen a confidential spreadsheet containing the names of former hospital employees.

The plaintiff’s lawyer E.E. Keenan, who was not representing Anderson but was present during the deposition, said he objected to the subpoena. “The news media should be free, under the First Amendment, to do their job without having to go through something like this,” Keenan said.

Anderson told the Tracker that he continues reporting on the lawsuit, and the subpoena has not impacted his objectivity.

“I think, if anything, this has just made me more aware of how business tend to work, but I am not spooked, and it has not impacted my news judgment,” he said.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

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In July 2021, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced to fanfare that it had just finished raising $2 billion in donations, a single-fiscal-year record for the nation’s largest health care charity. “Solving pediatric cancer is a global problem — a multi-trillion, multi-year problem,” Rick Shadyac, chief executive of St. Jude’s fundraising arm, told the Associated Press at the time. “The way we look at it is: If not St. Jude, then who?”

Financial disclosures newly released by St. Jude, however, show $886 million of the hospital’s record $2 billion-plus in revenues last fiscal year went unspent. Those surplus dollars instead flowed to the hospital’s reserve fund, which helped it grow to $7.6 billion by the end of June 2021. That’s enough money to run St. Jude’s 77-bed hospital in Memphis at last year’s levels for the next five years without a single additional donation.

The impressive growth in fundraising raises new concerns about the amount of money that the charity has put aside for its rainy day fund.

Last year, ProPublica reported that St. Jude had accumulated billions of dollars while many families of young patients treated at the hospital struggled financially. Parents told ProPublica that they’d exhausted savings and retirement accounts and borrowed from family and friends, despite St. Jude’s much-publicized pledge to alleviate many of the costs associated with treatment “because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.” St. Jude said they provided generous benefits to families, but cannot cover all financial obligations that a family experiences during a child’s illness. In response to the story, St. Jude significantly increased its benefits for families, including more support for travel and housing.

Some researchers, oncologists, health care advocates and families of patients complain that St. Jude’s fundraising makes it more difficult for other pediatric hospitals to raise money for their operations. St. Jude competes for fundraising dollars directly against other children’s hospitals, some of which have significant numbers of patients in clinical trials and their own research divisions focused on pediatric cancer care. To visualize just how much St. Jude outstrips its competitors: In 2020, U.S. News and World Report’s ranked the nation’s best children’s cancer centers. St. Jude’s, ranked tenth, pulled in more than the combined total of the nine hospitals ranked above it , according to financial records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

“Donors all want to get the biggest bang for their buck,” said Ge Bai, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s time for St. Jude to respect donors’ preferences and stop hoarding. Effectively and sufficiently spending money on the core mission is the only way to deserve donors’ trust and sustain their generosity.”

In a statement, St. Jude said the large reserve was a prudent cushion against swings in the stock market as well as the economic uncertainties created by global crises like the war in Ukraine. It said it expects the yearly cost of operating the hospital and making capital improvements to increase from a total of $2 billion in fiscal 2023 to $2.2 billion by fiscal 2026. At that point, according to the statement, contributions may not keep pace with spending and the hospital may need to tap the reserve fund. The hospital said it expects to spend a total of $12.9 billion over the six-year period beginning with fiscal 2022.

St. Jude said it cannot be fairly compared to any other hospital because its operating model relies disproportionately on public donations.

“Our reserves allow us now, and in the years ahead, to treat patients and continue research projects — no matter what happens to the economy or in the event of a disaster,” the statement said.

St. Jude said it is also expanding its work internationally, including a plan to spend $200 million over five years to help thousands of children in the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world receive free chemotherapy drugs. In recent months, the hospital has also helped pediatric cancer patients in Ukraine continue receiving care.

“Having a responsible reserve fund is critical to fueling this comprehensive, global strategic plan,” St. Jude wrote.

The Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, which sets standards for charitable spending, advises charities to avoid accumulating funds that could instead be used for current programs. It says a charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the past year’s expenses or the current year’s budget. The alliance' deducts assets like land and buildings from its calculations and combines the expenses of the hospital and its fundraising arm. The alliance calculation puts the reserve fund at 3.05 times higher than the current year budget of the hospital and ALSAC, which the charities provided to the alliance.Though St. Jude itself is slightly above the limit, the alliance said it remains in compliance.

St. Jude’s fundraising arm, the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, or ALSAC, spent $626 million in fiscal 2021, about 35% of the organization’s total expenses, the financial disclosures show. That figure includes fundraising and educating the public about childhood cancers. St. Jude spent $1.2 billion on treatment for children with major illnesses, laboratories and clinical trials and hospital administration. St. Jude said its fundraising and marketing expenses were well within industry standards.

The record-breaking $2 billion in contributions to St. Jude represented a 16% increase over the previous year. St. Jude said that it benefited from investment gains in a hot stock market in addition to the increase in contributions in fiscal 2021.

One key driver of the boost in donations was bequests, in which donors name St. Jude as a beneficiary in their wills. Such donations increased 24% from the prior year to $478 million, or almost one in four dollars donated to St. Jude.

The bequest program, while one of the most successful in the country in terms of dollars raised, has also led to disputes with donors’ family members and allegations the hospital is too aggressive in seeking monies from inheritances. St. Jude says that it operates with the highest ethical standards in carrying out donors’ intents.

While St. Jude’s fundraising thrived, the pandemic shutdown devastated many other charities.

St. Baldrick's Foundation is one of the largest funders of childhood cancer research in the country. Its wide-ranging programs pay for clinical trials to test new treatments and provide training for new doctors and researchers entering the field.

The charity primarily raises money through events where people shave their heads to solicit contributions. When COVID-19 triggered quarantines in March 2020, St. Baldrick's had to cancel scores of events and lost millions of dollars in donations, said Kathleen Ruddy, the organization’s chief executive.

In the fiscal year before the pandemic began, St. Baldrick's financial disclosures show it raised more than $36 million. Total donations last fiscal year, ending in June 2021, were about $18 million — a 49% drop. The charity had to close several research grant programs and lay off staff, Ruddy said.

People often ask if St. Baldrick's is part of St. Jude, Ruddy said, but in fact St. Jude applies for, and sometimes receives, research grants from St. Baldrick’s.

St. Jude is one of a number of deserving charities serving kids with cancer, Ruddy said.

“We have funded about $9.3 million worth of research at St. Jude” since the foundation launched in 2004, Ruddy said. “But we've funded over $300 million at other hospitals. So it tells you that no institution has a monopoly on talent and innovation and ideas.”

She said St. Baldrick’s fundraising has begun to recover and the charity plans to restore one of its shuttered research grants next fiscal year.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by David Armstrong and Ryan Gabrielson.

Deep into Missouri’s feverish summer, a St. Louis hardware store owner found his customers clamoring for something surprising: electric space heaters.

“The weather was warm, and it was strange that people were worried about it,” said Don Heberer, owner of Rathbone Hardware. He estimates that he sold about 20 percent more space heaters than normal for that time of year.

The reason? The local gas utility company was warning people that come winter, they might not have heat.

Spire Inc., an investor-owned gas conglomerate, issued the warnings last year after a court ordered it to shut down its new 65-mile STL pipeline. The court ruled that the company hadn’t proved to federal regulators that the customer-funded $287 million project was even needed.

“The reality is that the gas industry gets a ton of its money — the vast majority of its profit — from residential gas sales.”

“I went to barber shops and hair salons, and they were talking about the pipeline.”

The pipeline looked like an effort “to enrich Spire’s corporate parent rather than a needed piece of energy infrastructure.”

Natural gas arrives at Spire’s Laclede/Lange Delivery Station in north St. Louis County on July 8, 2021.

Photo: Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Mario Ariza.

St. Jude has long been a fundraising juggernaut, raising a combined $7.3 billion in the five previous fiscal years, including $1.7 billion in 2019 and $2 billion in 2020. As ProPublica documented, in 2019 St. Jude raised more money than “the rest of the top 10 children’s hospitals for cancer—combined.” As a result, St. Jude’s massive reserve account grew by 58 percent during that time period. On average, twenty percent of St. Jude’s revenue went to its reserve fund, thirty percent went to its fundraising operations, and the remaining fifty percent went to caring for patients.

Even after St. Jude touted its special promise to never bill families for food, transportation, or housing, in 2020 only two percent of its funds, or a little under $40 million, went to cover those costs. In fact, prior to ProPublica’s investigation, St. Jude did not cover nearly as many costs as its advertisements suggested. It only covered transportation and housing for one parent, did not cover these costs for a second parent or siblings, provided only $50 a day as a food stipend for most families (no matter their size), and would only cover hotel stays on the road if a family had to travel more than 500 miles from their home to St. Jude. St. Jude sent families to other charities if they needed additional funds, as the hospital would not cover any other costs associated with treatment, such as lost income. This left many families to worry about much more than their child’s health, as ProPublica detailed through the profiles of numerous families. Many resorted to GoFundMe campaigns to cover treatment costs, one family with a child undergoing treatment was denied hotel stipends because St. Jude incorrectly determined they lived 491 miles away from the hospital, and another had to stop treatment altogether after the family spent $10,000 from a savings account they had been adding to for years, in hopes of making a down payment on a home.

After ProPublica presented its findings to St. Jude, the hospital issued a letter outlining an expansion of the costs it would cover. St. Jude will now cover transportation for two adults, housing for three people, and a $25 per person daily food stipend. While St. Jude now does more to cover a family’s expenses associated with treatment, the ProPublica report also documented other misleading practices by St. Jude. Among them, its lawyers cite a federal anti-kickback statute, which prevents compensation for medical referrals, as a reason for the limited amount of aid available to families. St. Jude’s lawyers have yet to explain how these things are related. St. Jude also claims that its limits on aid are clearly disclosed on its website, when they are not. Furthermore, although St. Jude is proud of its recently approved $11.5 billion six-year strategic plan, which it touts as an “expansion of patient care,” ProPublica author David Armstrong explained in a 1A radio interview that $7 billion of that figure is intended to fund the current operation of the hospital, and $1 billion is marked as depreciation value.

As of April 2022, no corporate news outlets have reported on this story.

Sources:

David Armstrong and Ryan Gabrielson,”St. Jude Hoards Billions While Many of Its Families Drain Their Savings,” ProPublica, November 12, 2021

Avery Kleinman, ”St. Jude Makes Big Promises. Do They Hold Up?,” 1A, November 29, 2021

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

The post St. Jude Hoards Billions While Running Misleading Advertising about Financial Support for Its Patients appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

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This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and APM Reports.

When the final numbers showed that St. Louis had reduced its murders last year while other big cities were hitting records, city officials said their success was due to smart use of crime data and effective anti-violence programs.

But over the past two years, St. Louis has quietly lowered its murder count in another way: classifying more than three dozen killings as what are termed justifiable homicides, sometimes in apparent violation of FBI guidelines for reporting crimes, a ProPublica/APM Reports investigation found.

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And for a handful of slayings, the department has simply omitted the cases from its annual totals.

From 2010 through 2019, St. Louis police classified an average of six killings a year by private citizens as justifiable homicides, meaning incidents in which someone killed another person who was committing a serious criminal offense. Those cases were not counted in the city’s official murder tally.

In 2020, they counted at least 17 that way. In 2021, the number jumped to at least 22. Had just a handful of those justifiable homicides been classified as murders, St. Louis might have set its all-time murder record in 2020 and had its second highest annual total in 27 years in 2021 — changes that might have altered the conversation about the city’s success in reducing violent crime.

The news organizations found that over the two years, detectives sought murder charges in at least five cases labeled as justified. Prosecutors declined to file charges in four of them; in the fifth, prosecutors later charged a suspect with murder, but the case was still counted in police statistics as a justifiable homicide. FBI guidelines say police must count murders based on results from their investigation, regardless of a prosecutor’s action.

The news organizations’ examination of crime statistics doesn’t alter the overall picture of the city’s decline in murder last year — from what the department reported as 263 in 2020 to 198 last year, a drop of nearly 25%. But it adds important context to that picture, showing the city’s murder count is becoming less reliable as a measure of the number of lives that ended in violence.

In cities that have struggled to contain violent crime, as St. Louis has, the murder count is a rolling report card that is used to measure the success or failure of elected leaders and the police department.

The murder tally has long been the first item of business at the department’s Monday morning media briefing, which catalogs weekend violence. So far this year, the reduction in homicides has continued. But the rise in slayings classified as justifiable has not received much attention from the public.

When the murder count goes up, companies talk about leaving the city, residents consider moving away and local politicians debate new anti-crime measures. Officials in St. Louis even considered using surveillance aircraft to battle a reported rise in street violence. When the murder count goes down, officials cite it as an example of their sound leadership.

Two years ago, the issue of the city’s crime rate became especially urgent, with the metro area’s largest public company, the health care company Centene, getting involved. In November 2020, according to records, Jim Brown, a consultant to then-Mayor Lyda Krewson, suggested in an email to a consultant — who was working for Centene to evaluate the police department — that St. Louis could better manage the issue by combining its data with the much larger suburban St. Louis County.

If the city and county reported their crime data together, Brown wrote, “our sky high murder rates and other crimes statistics would come down considerably.”

Police compile and analyze data to track crime trends and guide crime-fighting strategies, so it’s imperative they be accurate and carry the same meaning from year to year, said Victor St. John, an assistant professor of criminology at Saint Louis University. When those statistics are used as a political measure, he said, “you can switch up the definitions, which will change what the trends look like and can confuse, intentionally or unintentionally, anyone looking at changes in the numbers.”

Jane Dueker, the lawyer and lobbyist for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the union that represents rank-and-file officers, said she believed political pressure played a role in how the city counted murders.

“When you have such a high jump in justifiable homicide,” she said, “that’s definitely a red flag.”

Dan Isom, the city’s interim public safety director, disagreed, calling Dueker’s charge that politics colors how the city compiles crime data “yet another baseless accusation against the Police Department not based in reality.”

The investigation is based in part on 12 years of data provided by the department through a public records request. Some of the killings clearly appeared to be justified, based on the evidence laid out in police reports. And the department has also sometimes counted murders even in cases where prosecutors declined to press charges.

The department told APM Reports and ProPublica that its own data on how individual cases were classified might not be accurate, but it repeatedly failed to respond to requests to correct inaccuracies. It said it considers a broad range of evidence before making a decision and consults prosecutors, but refused to discuss specific cases.

“While the Circuit Attorney’s Office has the final say in the decision to prosecute, our department makes the final determination as to whether an incident is classified as criminal or justifiable homicide,” police spokesperson Evita Caldwell said in a statement. “This decision is ultimately made by the investigator, the supervisor, the commander of the Homicide Division, as well as the Commander of the Bureau of Investigative Services.”

Through a spokesperson, the office of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner declined to comment. Prosecutors are independent from the police department and not involved in deciding how cases are classified for crime statistics.

FBI crime reporting standards instruct police departments to count as a murder any death that results from a fight, argument, quarrel, assault or commission of a crime. The FBI defines a justifiable homicide more narrowly: a situation where an officer on duty kills a perpetrator of a serious crime or when a private citizen kills a perpetrator during the commission of a serious crime.

An example is when a homeowner fatally shoots someone who has broken into their home.

It’s difficult to tell if St. Louis is an outlier in reporting justifiable homicide by private citizens. Nationally, it is rare for police departments to count such cases: Just 405 total were reported to the FBI in 2020, compared with more than 17,000 murders the same year, the most recent year for which data was available.

While cities such as Indianapolis and Phoenix have recorded numbers of justifiable homicides by private citizens that are comparable to St. Louis’ numbers, police in Chicago, Kansas City and Baltimore did not report any in 2021. In Kansas City, which saw its second-highest murder total last year, police said they classify only officer-involved shootings as justifiable.

“That’s the whole idea behind uniform crime reporting, it’s supposed to be the same for everybody, and isn’t, especially with regard to this kind of subtle distinction” of determining who is at fault in each case, said Gary Kleck, a professor emeritus at Florida State University, who has studied justifiable homicide.

St. Louis Chief of Police John Hayden Jr. acknowledged the rise in justifiable homicides in a January interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, attributing the rise to changes in Missouri law. Those changes, he said, provided more latitude for people who carry weapons and use them in what they say is self-defense than a change in criteria by the department.

“The analysis of whether or not something is justified, that has not changed,” Hayden said. But when someone claims they acted in self-defense, he said, “I would say that makes the analysis very challenging.”

FBI guidelines advise against classifying a killing as justifiable based solely on a suspect’s claim they acted in self-defense.

“A claim of self-defense alone is not sufficient; there must be corroborating evidence to substantiate the claim,” an official with the FBI’s Global Law Enforcement Support Section said in a statement. “The agency must determine if there is corroborating evidence to classify the incident as a justifiable homicide. The investigation must determine the degree of responsibility of the participants.”

The investigation also found St. Louis police put in place procedures to classify some killings as justifiable even when detectives believe the killing was unjustified but prosecutors decline to bring charges because they believe a suspect could reasonably claim self-defense.

A memo from the homicide commander to detectives says detectives should review such cases to decide if they will be counted as murders.

“The FBI is very clear that it doesn’t matter what the prosecutors think,” said Jacob Kaplan, a Princeton University criminologist and the chief data scientist at Research on Policing Reform and Accountability. “These are police statistics. If they think it’s a murder, then it’s a murder. Even if the prosecutor later says this isn’t a murder, like a prosecutor drops the charges, that doesn’t matter.”

Dueker, the police union lawyer, said detectives believe the practice undermines their work and the integrity of crime data.

In October 2020, St. Louis police responded to a report of a car crash and found Staveion Durham shot in the chest. Police said that they were told that Durham and others in the car had shot at each other.

Three months after the incident, prosecutors charged one of the men in the crash, Marlon Hampton, with second-degree murder and other charges.

Dueker pointed out the contradiction between the department’s classification of the killing as justifiable and the murder charge against Hampton. She said if she were Hampton’s attorney, the department’s classification of the homicide as justifiable “would be Exhibit A.” Hampton’s attorney, Tyson Cole, said he could not comment on the case except that he was aware the police had classified the death as a justifiable homicide.

In another case in which detectives sought murder charges but police classified the killing as justifiable, Christopher Alexander was shot to death on March 8, 2020, by Jamal Johnson.

Alexander’s sister Sierra Alexander said in an interview that before the shooting, which she witnessed, her brother had taken drugs and was acting aggressively, choking one of her friends before a group of friends stopped him.

The medical examiner’s investigator said Alexander also pistol-whipped a man during the incident. A video of the incident from a surveillance camera showed that with a gun in his hand, Alexander lunged at and shoved another man, Jamal Johnson, who also had a gun, video shows. Johnson then shot Alexander several times.

Sierra Alexander said a detective told her he believed the case was murder. Police sought to charge Johnson with murder and other charges, but prosecutors took the case to a grand jury, which indicted Johnson for gun possession but not murder. Johnson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years probation.

Johnson’s lawyer, Kristi Flint, said Johnson was well within his rights to shoot Alexander and that police were wrong to seek murder charges against him.

“When the detective arrested Mr. Johnson, he knew that my client had acted in self-defense,” Flint said. “Regardless of the facts, my client will now have an arrest for murder on his record.”

Precious Cunningham’s death, likewise, was not classified as a murder. She was driving two teens and two toddlers one afternoon in March 2020 when she got caught between two cars engaged in a gun battle.

Cunningham wasn’t shot, but she crashed, was ejected from the car and was killed. St. Louis police commanders said the case highlighted the dangerous reality of life in St. Louis: Gunfights can break out at any time and motorists should take extra precautions in the city. No one has been charged in the case.

“I don’t understand why she’s not even listed,” said Cunningham’s cousin, Tikisha Johnson. “Her life was just as valuable as anybody else’s on that list.”

The department has also made a change to how it counts some murders — which has led to several cases being left out of the totals that might have been counted in past years. In many cases when a victim was assaulted in one year and died in a subsequent year, the department historically counted the murder in the year of death. In 2018, for example, the police counted the murder of a store owner who died after having been shot more than two years before.

But after switching at the end of 2020 to the FBI’s next-generation reporting system, which lets departments amend crime data after it’s been reported, St. Louis police said they would now count it in the year of the initial incident, not when the victim died. That means the city’s murder total is not a final count when the mayor announces it at year’s end. Since the city said it had 195 murders in 2021, the tally has grown by three people who died this year from wounds suffered in shootings last year.

But St. Louis police are not amending years before 2021. As a result, at least nine murder victims are not counted in any year. Among them is 17-year-old Cameron Edwards, who was wounded in a shooting in November 2020 and died from his injuries in December 2021, according to records.

Beyond the question of how killings are counted lies another question: Do these judgment calls about how to classify a killing influence the accuracy of a figure that people use to measure a city’s level of violence?

The fatal shooting of Jason Dudley on Jan. 2, 2020, goes to the heart of that question. The day after Jeffrey Brown Jr.’s car was stolen, Brown found it parked near his mother’s home. When he contacted the police, they told him to drive it home with a spare key and to secure it with an anti-theft device. But because he believed the thief also had gotten his mother’s house key when he stole the car, Brown decided to wait to confront anyone who came back for the car.

That was Dudley, who according to his family had a history of drug abuse. Brown told police he saw Dudley use the car key to open the driver’s door, dashed over to confront him, then pulled him out of the car and held him at gunpoint.

Brown, according to a video of the interrogation the Dudley family provided, told police that Dudley said to him several times, “You don’t have to do this.”

He said Dudley repeatedly tried to escape. Brown, according to the interrogation video, even demonstrated for a detective how he held the gun to Dudley’s back and ordered him to put his hands on the car. But Dudley turned and tried to wrestle away the gun.

Brown told police that he feared “it was him or me.” He said he had his finger on the trigger and the gun “went off.” Dudley collapsed on the corner with a gunshot wound to the head.

Dudley’s family insisted the killing was murder. They said Brown had no evidence that Dudley had stolen the car, had no legal right to hold him and could have called the police. Brown, they said, had gotten back his car. Under the circumstances, the family said, Dudley had as much right to defend himself as Brown. Brown did not respond to messages left with both of his parents. The detective in the case also did not respond to a request for comment.

Peter Joy, a professor at Washington University School of Law, said that if Dudley had gotten the upper hand, taken the gun and killed Brown, he also would have had a strong argument that he had a right to stand his ground, as Missouri law provides. Prosecutors might have declined to charge him with murder as well.

“What strikes me is how bad the ‘stand your ground’ law is, but also how reluctant people in law enforcement and prosecutors are to pursue cases that probably should be pursued but where it’s going to be difficult to prove, and where they are basically deferring to the fact that it’s going to be difficult so they just decide not to bring the case,” said Joy, an expert in legal ethics and criminal justice.

St. John, the criminologist at Saint Louis University, said there were “a lot of things wrong here.” How many cases like these, he wondered, were being included in the increasing numbers of justifiable homicides? “I don’t know if that’s justifiable in any way, and those numbers hide it.”

The detective, according to a video of Brown’s interrogation that Dudley’s family obtained, told Brown the homicide unit was busy. Dudley was the seventh homicide in two days. He said he would discuss the case with a prosecutor but “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, OK?”

Months after the killing, the police classified the death as a justifiable homicide.

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler, ProPublica, and Tom Scheck, APM Reports.

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Most Americans know St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital through television advertisements featuring Hollywood celebrities asking for contributions or the millions of fundraising appeals that regularly arrive in mailboxes across the country.

But a select group of potential donors is targeted in a more intimate way. Representatives of the hospital’s fundraising arm visit their homes; dine with them at local restaurants; send them personal notes and birthday cards; and schedule them for “love calls.”

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What makes these potential donors so special? They told St. Jude they were considering leaving the hospital a substantial amount in their wills. Once the suggestion was made, specialized fundraisers set a singular goal: build relationships with the donors to make sure the money flows to the hospital after their deaths.

The intense cultivation of these donors is part of a strategy that has helped St. Jude establish what may be the most successful charitable bequest program in the country. In the most recent five-year period of reported financial results, bequests constituted $1.5 billion, or 20%, of the $7.5 billion St. Jude raised in those years. That amount, both in terms of dollars and as a percentage of fundraising, far outpaces that raised by other leading children’s hospitals and charities generally.

While a financial boon to St. Jude, the hospital’s pursuit has led to fraught disputes with donors’ family members and allegations that it goes too far in its quest for bequests.

St. Jude is a major research center with a 73-bed hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, that primarily treats kids from the Mid-South. Its bequest operation has a broad reach, with fundraisers based across the nation and a willingness to challenge families in court over the assets their loved ones leave behind. These battles can sometimes be lengthy and costly, spending donor money on litigation and diminishing inheritances. Family attorneys who specialize in such fights say that St. Jude can be especially aggressive, often pursuing cases all the way to state supreme courts.

“At the end of it, there is very little to hold on to feel good about,” said Vance Lanier, of Lafayette, Louisiana, who won a yearslong legal battle with St. Jude over his father’s estate but not before both sides spent heavily on the case.

“Think of all the fees for lawyers that didn’t go to St. Jude, not one child, not one cancer patient,” Lanier said. “Where is the sanity in all this?”

The nonprofit even courts those who aid in estate planning and drawing up wills, sponsoring conferences where attorneys, financial advisers and estate professionals gather. On at least one occasion it offered attendees a chance to win a golf trip.

The prospective donors wooed by St. Jude are often people like Nona Harris: elderly, childless women with substantial wealth. Harris notified the charity in 1996 that she was considering leaving it a bequest. St. Jude spent the next two decades cultivating Harris. An internal database, built to collect information on donors, tracked nearly 100 calls and other contacts between Harris and the charity’s fundraisers during that time — an average of almost once every two months. It also noted information Harris shared with fundraisers.

By the time she died in 2015, the charity knew just about everything there was to know about her. It knew about the health problems of her husband, J.D., from the medicines that he took to the heart defibrillator that needed to be replaced. St. Jude knew that J.D.’s mother died when he was 13 and that one of Nona’s relatives had a rare tongue cancer. It knew the couple owned a condominium in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a ranch with cattle and horses in Kansas.

Most importantly, the charity knew the couple planned to leave their nearly $6 million estate to St. Jude. But Nona died before J.D., and after he changed his estate plan — reducing St. Jude’s payout by about $2.5 million — the charity went to court, triggering an expensive, drawn-out legal battle that pitted the hospital against several of J.D.’s family members.

Estate matters can be contentious, and many nonprofit organizations, including ProPublica, seek donations in people’s wills.

But St. Jude’s pursuit of such donations stands out. Bequests to St. Jude, as a percentage of total contributions, are more than double the national average of 9% as calculated by Giving USA.

And it receives more than other children’s hospitals that list bequest donations. Boston Children’s Hospital reported that estate and trust donations ranged from 3% to 6.5% annually during the three-year period of 2014 through 2016. Donations from estates to Children’s Hospital Colorado Foundation represents 3.5% of total giving at that hospital, according to its website. Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said its bequest giving was aligned with national benchmarks such as the 9% figure from Giving USA.

For such organizations, any decision about waging legal fights with family members often comes down to a public relations decision.

“A legal fight could mar the reputation of a charity,” said Elizabeth Carter, a law professor at Louisiana State University who specializes in estate planning. “A lot of charities decide it is just not worth it; we don’t need that bad press. Occasionally you will see them fighting it, but not often because of the bad PR that comes from it.”

In a statement issued through its fundraising arm, the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, or ALSAC, St. Jude said its bequest program “operates with the highest ethical standards and with bequest program best practices like other large charities.”

But it declined to answer specific questions about its bequest program, including how many cases are in litigation, or to respond in detail to questions about individual cases in which it has contested wills.

In 2017, Fred Jones, the ALSAC lawyer who oversees bequest matters, told an Oklahoma court that the charity was involved in more than 100 legal fights over disputed estates. Jones said many of those involved other parties challenging an estate in which St. Jude had an interest, but that it did pursue legal action on its own in some cases. Jones said St. Jude received about 2,000 new bequests in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2017. In a statement, ALSAC said it litigates less than less than 1% of the thousands of estate donations that it receives.

Jones told the court that neither St. Jude nor ALSAC “is in the business of trying cases,” in part because such efforts are funded with donations for the treatment of sick children. As a result, Jones said, St. Jude only initiates cases in which due diligence reveals substantial evidence to support a claim. “In effect, we’re using donor dollars — which we very carefully protect — in those cases where we believe that there has been a curtailment of the donor's actual intent,” he said. Jones did not respond to a request for comment. St. Jude declined to provide further details on the use of donor funds to pay legal costs. In some jurisdictions, courts allow winning parties in a case to seek legal fees from the losing side and legal costs are sometimes reimbursed as part of settlement agreements.

To make the case that estate proceeds should go to St. Jude, the charity sometimes argues that relatives are not entitled to any proceeds from their family’s estates.

“Where I think the line is crossed is when they promote the disinheritance of children or families,” said Cary Colt Payne, a Las Vegas attorney representing a son who is battling St. Jude over his father’s estate.

In its statement, ALSAC said ProPublica’s reporting on bequests was “highly selective and flawed as it focused on a small handful of contested cases over several years out of the many types of these donations received each year. These contested estate matters often cover complex and sensitive family matters, include multiple charities, and involve local lawyers advising ALSAC/St. Jude.”

St. Jude’s responsibility, according to the statement, is “to carry out the clear written intent of a donor, typically stated in a written will or trust drafted by an independent lawyer, most often witnessed and notarized. These are beautiful legacy gifts with enduring impact, enabling us to remain focused on our mission: Finding cures. Saving children.”

St. Jude, founded by the entertainer Danny Thomas, makes a unique promise as part of its fundraising: “Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food — because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.”

That pledge, and the ubiquitous appeals for donations that accompany it, has helped St. Jude become the country’s largest health care charity. Recent years have seen record-breaking fundraising gains. The hospital raises so much money that between 2016 and 2020, it annually steered an average of $400 million into a growing reserve fund that totaled $5.2 billion as of June 30, 2020 — the most recent figures publicly available.

To raise money, St. Jude depends on the related nonprofit ALSAC, which conducts the hospital’s fundraising and awareness campaigns.

ALSAC’s interactions with Nona Harris provide a window into the techniques used by the charity to encourage bequests and cultivate those who express an interest in making them.

In January 1996, Nona called St. Jude to let the hospital know she was considering making a large bequest, which at that time she said could be up to $500,000.

Phone calls from potential donors like Harris are just one of the ways ALSAC learns of potential bequests. Other times, the hospital is alerted by a financial planner or estate lawyer of plans by clients to leave money to St. Jude. Most times, proceeds from bequests just show up with no prior notice after a person has died. The charity also solicits them in fundraising materials, encouraging anyone open to considering St. Jude in their will to notify it using an enclosed information card and envelope.

Harris, after notifying St. Jude of the potential bequest, then asked that no one contact her. That request was apparently ignored as an ALSAC staffer was tasked with getting in touch with Nona a few months after her call, according to a printout of a computerized log of interactions with Nona filed in court.

ALSAC bequest specialists maintain a “portfolio” of estate donors who are ranked by importance, according to current and former ALSAC employees. The size and range of the ALSAC bequest operation gives it the advantage of being able to meet in person with donors anywhere in the country.

ALSAC sent Nona handwritten birthday and holiday cards, and in one case, just a note to say, “I thought of you today.” The cards were often followed by phone calls around the holidays to check in with her.

On four occasions — in 2000, twice in 2001 and in 2005 — Nona was listed for what were described in the log as “love calls.” St. Jude declined to provide details on what such calls entailed.

The ALSAC staff invited the Harrises to special events, including a 50th anniversary gala party in Los Angeles, as well as asking them repeatedly to come to Memphis and visit the hospital. “I will be sure to be at the front door waiting for your arrival,” a staffer wrote in 2007. Family members do not believe the Harrises ever visited.

One hint in the notes of why Nona chose St. Jude as a beneficiary of her estate was a comment she made in 2004 that she “was thrilled to do it since St. Jude is her patron saint.” Although the hospital is named after the saint, it does not have any religious affiliations. J.D. also had a fondness for the children’s hospital, according to family members, and would occasionally wear a St. Jude baseball cap sent to the couple by fundraisers.

The Harrises were different from other large bequest donors in one significant way. It doesn’t appear anyone from ALSAC ever visited them at their home.

Former ALSAC employees who worked on bequests said they would visit some donors dozens of times. They said some of those were older donors who were lonely and enjoyed the companionship. Internally, the jobs came to be known as “the tea and cookie positions” since that’s what many visits to donors involved. One staffer said he became so close to one donor that he attended holiday dinners at the family’s home.

An ALSAC employee based in Rhode Island said she would meet in person with 150 to 200 people a year throughout New England and upstate New York who indicated they planned to leave money to St. Jude or were considering it, according to testimony she gave in 2015 in a New Hampshire estate dispute.

The employee, Maureen Mallon, was an estate lawyer in private practice for 20 years before joining ALSAC as a philanthropic adviser in 2010.

“Part of my role is to connect them, to build a relationship with them, to give them more information about the hospital,” she said of visiting potential donors.

Mallon testified about her relationship with one donor, whom she visited at her home in person five times, usually for an hour or more. The woman — who was elderly, widowed and did not have children — would have lunch ready for the two of them and always sent Mallon home with baked goods. One time she called to make sure Mallon made it home safely. Mallon said the woman discussed details of her estate and shared family histories and relationships. She confided that certain relatives would be unhappy if they learned she planned to leave her home to the Memphis hospital. The visits and notes about what was discussed were recorded in a database, according to the testimony. Attempts to contact Mallon were unsuccessful.

The Harrises were private people who had retired to their ranch in Kansas following years of traveling the world as part of J.D.’s work in the oil industry. They used their Tulsa condo when they came for medical care in the city.

On the ranch, J.D. would rise early each day to drive the foreman around the 320-acre property to feed the scores of cattle and horses. He typically dressed in blue jeans, black cowboy boots with his initials on them, a cowboy hat and a white oxford shirt with two pockets that he used to carry a small notebook, a pencil and his checkbook.

J.D. was plainspoken and frank, friends recalled, while Nona was described as a generous person who was always impeccably dressed.

After Nona died on the day after Thanksgiving in 2015, J.D. became closer with his remaining family members, including two nieces and a nephew, according to court testimony.

J.D. was particularly fond of his great-nephew Brent Neitzke, who lived in Indiana and visited him at the ranch on a regular basis after Nona’s death. Most Sunday nights, J.D. and Neitzke would talk for hours on the phone. Neitzke said they discussed politicians, happenings in the world and J.D.’s travels. He said J.D. also talked about his estate and his plans to split it.

J.D. told his accountant that the estate plan he formed after Nona’s death was something of a compromise. He would still be honoring Nona’s wish to help St. Jude while at the same time taking care of his family.

When J.D. called ALSAC two months after Nona died to share the news that his wife had passed away, he told the staffer who was the main contact for Nona that he wanted “to talk to me at length about his codicile (sic) to their will,” according to court records. A codicil modifies or revokes parts of a will.

Later, the ALSAC staffer tried to set up a meeting with J.D. at his home, but J.D. said that it was too soon for a visit and that he wanted to speak to his attorney first, according to notes of the conversation recorded by ALSAC.

For ALSAC, the next step was the courtroom.

That’s where Vance Lanier found himself when St. Jude fought him over the distribution of his father’s estate.

Lanier is a financial planner in Lafayette, Louisiana, who helps clients with estate and trust matters. His father, Eugene, died in December 2015. His will directed that $100,000 from the proceeds of the sale of his home go to St. Jude.

But there was a problem. The elder Lanier did not own his home, according to his son. More than a decade earlier he had placed it in a trust, along with other assets, to benefit his three children.

To Lanier, it was a simple matter. St. Jude was not entitled to any money from the house sale. “He had given away his assets to put into a trust,” Lanier said. “My dad did not own it. He could have changed that while he was alive, but he didn’t.”

Still, recognizing that his father did want to make a donation to St. Jude, and hoping to avoid spending money on legal fees, Lanier said he offered St. Jude $25,000 to settle the matter. The offer was rejected, according to Lanier and his attorney, and St. Jude instead pursued the matter in a yearslong court fight. St. Jude argued that the elder Lanier, through his will, “clearly directed the sale” of the property and that $100,000 of the proceeds should go to the hospital.

A trial court ruled in favor of Vance Lanier. St. Jude appealed that ruling but eventually lost. The charity then asked the state Supreme Court to reverse that ruling, but the request was denied, ending the matter.

Lanier said the legal dispute was expensive for both sides. He spent $50,000 in lawyer fees. Even if St. Jude had won the case, he said, much of the money it would have received from the elder Lanier’s estate would have been wiped out by legal costs. St. Jude did not respond to questions about how much it paid its lawyers.

Lanier said he wrote to the chief executive of St. Jude complaining that the legal fight was a waste of time and the charity’s resources.

Before the estate dispute, Lanier said he and other members of his extended family were supporters of St. Jude and had collectively donated thousands of dollars to the Memphis hospital. That is no longer the case, he said.

“After this and seeing the waste, I don’t want anything to do with them,” he said.

One sign of the significance of bequests to St. Jude is that it frequently underwrites conferences for estate lawyers and financial planners, who can help clients determine which charities to leave money to in their wills.

In some cases, it is the only charity involved. Typical sponsors are mostly banks, trust companies and consultancies.

St. Jude has been a top-level diamond sponsor for the past several years of the Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, an annual conference that typically draws more than 3,000 attendees.

The $30,000 cost of a diamond sponsorship allows St. Jude to bring as many as 10 employees to work at its deluxe suite on the exhibit hall floor. St. Jude also gets a list of all attendees and their emails and expanded networking times with conferencegoers.

At the 2017 conference, St. Jude raffled off a free trip to attend a PGA Tour golf event in Memphis.

The winner, estate and tax adviser Jack Meola, of New Jersey, said that in addition to attending the golf event, he and his wife were taken on a tour of St. Jude. “It’s a very emotional experience,” he said.

At the Heckerling conference the next year, ALSAC asked him to give a luncheon talk to attendees about St. Jude, Meola said.

He said he shares his experience of visiting the hospital with his clients when they are considering charities as beneficiaries.

“I always talk to clients and give them the example,” Meola said. “They may not end up choosing St. Jude, but I give them the emotional side.”

St. Jude’s relationship with a Las Vegas estate lawyer ensured it learned about a lucrative estate case in time to fight for the bequest all the way to the state Supreme Court, and it raised ethical questions about whether the lawyer had been fully transparent with her client.

The lawyer, Kristin Tyler, drafted a will in October 2012 for Theodore Scheide Jr. that directed his estate go to St. Jude. But after Scheide died in 2014, the original of that will could not be located. A guardian who served as the administrator of Scheide’s estate concluded that he destroyed it, rendering it null and void, and determined his money should go to his son.

In 2016, just as a court was on the verge of finalizing the passing of Scheide’s $2.6 million estate to his son, Tyler learned of the plans for the money and alerted Jones, the ALSAC attorney. Tyler knew to call Jones because in addition to Scheide she had another client: St. Jude.

Tyler was vague about what prompted her to look into the matter at the last minute, writing in one email at the time that “for some reason I recently thought about Theo Scheide.” She was certain, however, that the money should go to St. Jude and not Scheide’s son. The two were estranged and Tyler said Scheide was adamant about disinheriting his son.

After calling Jones, Tyler then contacted a partner at a prominent Las Vegas law firm that worked with the charity. In an email, she advised the partner that St. Jude would be reaching out to him and “you need to jump on this quick.” She offered to help, writing, “I want to make sure this estate goes 100% to St. Jude and not to Theo’s estranged son.” She wrote that it would be “a shame” for the money to go to the son.

Tyler later testified that she had represented the hospital in at least two, and perhaps three, estate matters. She testified that she was unsure if she was working for St. Jude at the same time she helped Scheide draft his will. In any event, she said that it wouldn’t have been necessary to tell Scheide about her work for St. Jude because the interests of the two parties were not opposed to each other — meaning there was no conflict of interest. St. Jude did not respond to questions about its relationship with Tyler.

Legal experts said the need to disclose the relationship with St. Jude would depend on the nature and extent of Tyler’s dealings with the charity. Tyler declined to comment.

A district court judge, after a hearing, ruled that the estate should go to the son as there were not two independent witnesses who could vouch for the existence and substance of the missing original will. St. Jude appealed that decision to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the lower court in 2020 and ruled in favor of the charity. Appeals in the case continue.

Key to the supreme court ruling were affidavits from Tyler and her assistant testifying to the legitimacy of the missing will, saying that they witnessed Scheide sign it and that, to their knowledge, he had not intentionally destroyed or revoked it.

For Scheide’s son, Chip, the most painful part of the legal fight with St. Jude was not potentially losing out on his father’s estate but the way he was characterized by the charity and years of uncertainty over the potential inheritance. In appealing the case to the state Supreme Court, St. Jude repeatedly referred to Chip as a “disinherited” son and claimed his father had “no interest” in contacting him. He called it “intentionally hurtful.”

Chip acknowledges an estrangement from his father but says it was not rooted in anger or a dispute. Instead, Chip said, it was the result of a decision his father made in the wake of his parents’ divorce to remarry and move from Pittsburgh to Florida when Chip was 11 or 12. After he moved away, Chip only saw his father a few times.

“He made a choice,” Chip said of his father and the distant relationship between the two. Still, he said, the two stayed in touch. They regularly exchanged holiday cards and just a year before he died, Theodore sent Chip a congratulatory card and a check when he married for a second time.

Chip was in Las Vegas about a year before his father died and tried to contact him, without success. Later he learned his father was in the hospital at that time.

Despite the contention of St. Jude that Theodore did not want to contact Chip, Diane Prosser, a case manager for the guardianship service that managed Theodore’s affairs, said in an interview with ProPublica that Theodore talked frequently about his son toward the end of his life.

“I know towards the end, he mentioned his son a lot,” Prosser said. “I remember saying, should we be looking for his son?” Prosser said she discussed the matter with her boss but doesn’t remember any effort by the guardianship service to find Chip before Theodore died on Aug. 17, 2014.

J.D. Harris was admitted to the hospital for a heart valve procedure on Dec. 15, 2016, a little over a year after his wife died. During the operation, his kidneys failed, according to court testimony. Doctors told J.D. that if he didn’t begin dialysis he would die within days. J.D., who was 92, told the doctors he wasn’t interested in the treatment.

By this point, J.D. had not yet made the changes to his estate that he talked about during the previous months. On Dec. 19, he called his longtime accountant, Dwight Kealiher, from the hospital and told him he wanted to rework his trust and will.

Attorney Jerry Zimmerman, a well-known Tulsa estate lawyer, met twice with J.D. at the hospital on Dec. 21. Zimmerman questioned J.D. to make sure he was competent, asking him personal questions and inquiring about his assets. He said in court testimony that J.D. was lucid and accurately recalled details of his estate and his existing trust.

Zimmerman said J.D. told him he wanted to change his estate plan to split it between St. Jude and four family members, including Neitzke. J.D. also wanted $100,000 to go to Jim Tibbets, the foreman of his ranch, whom he considered a friend, Zimmerman testified.

Zimmerman returned to the hospital the next day with the reworked estate documents, but J.D. said he wanted Kealiher to be there to review them and didn’t sign. A day later, on Dec. 23, Zimmerman came back with Kealiher, who had just been released from a different hospital.

J.D., however, was in no condition to sign, according to his medical records. A hospital notary said he was “laboring” and might be confused. A nurse, concerned that J.D. was too weak to sign and incoherent, eventually asked everyone to leave the room.

Tibbets slept in J.D.’s room that night and said that J.D. woke up several times asking about the estate documents and requesting that Zimmerman come to the hospital so he could sign them. Tibbets explained it was the middle of the night and that wasn’t possible, court records show.

The next day was Christmas Eve and Zimmerman was not available to come to the hospital, court records show. He gave the papers to be signed to Tibbets. Overnight, Tibbets said J.D. again woke up and asked about the estate documents as well as inquiring about the animals on his ranch.

“He was adamant about it,” Tibbets said in an interview of J.D.’s desire to finalize his estate plans. “His mind was still sharp right until he passed away.”

Tibbets said he put a piece of cardboard underneath the papers and that J.D. meticulously signed each letter of his name, understanding the importance of the moment. When he finished, he told Tibbets he was “glad” it was done. He died later on Christmas Day.

Six months later, St. Jude began the court fight seeking to overturn a district court finding that the restated trust was properly executed and requesting a new trial on the matter.

The hospital said that it didn’t receive proper notice of the nature of the district court hearing on J.D.’s estate and that it was unfairly denied a chance to introduce medical records showing that J.D. was often incoherent, comatose or otherwise incapable of decision-making at the times he was asked to sign the reworked estate plan. The charity did not contest that J.D. signed the documents.

“He talked to his lawyer. He talked to his accountant. He talked to his family. He talked to his ranch hand, who was family to him,” Tulsa District Court Judge Kurt G. Glassco said in a ruling, which found that J.D.’s reworked estate plan was valid. “And he knew exactly what he wanted to do.”

After Glassco denied St. Jude’s request for a new trial, the charity then appealed to the state Supreme Court, which delegated the matter to the Court of Civil Appeals.

As the case dragged on, J.D.’s nephew Doug Holmes, who was one of the family members named as a beneficiary in the restated trust, wrote a letter to the St. Jude board of directors.

“The continued unfounded litigation has caused significant pain to family members, as we repeatedly have to relive the final days of our dear uncle,” he wrote in December 2018. “With each of St. Jude’s legal filings, the attorney fees increase, sapping precious dollars that could go to St. Jude families.”

In December 2019, the appeals court upheld the lower court ruling. In 2020, more than three years after J.D.’s death, his family members finally received their shares of his nearly $6 million estate.

Neitzke said his family remains mystified as to why St. Jude challenged the distribution of J.D.’s trust. The charity was still being granted a generous, multimillion-dollar bequest and J.D. even told the charity to expect a change from what Nona had promised before she died, he said.

Neitzke said he had been a supporter of St. Jude, but the litigation had changed his view.

“I thought this was a waste of time and money,” he said. “I will never give them another dime.”

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Former ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by David Armstrong and Ryan Gabrielson.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.