O’Brien, 56, had just been denied parole, and he hoped the transfer to less secure housing would look good when he goes before the board again. But more than that, he just needed to pass the time. Having spent all but a couple years of his adult life imprisoned, he knew that a change of scenery would make a difference. And while Chino looks nothing like coastal Santa Monica, where he grew up, something in the air made it feel more like home.

O’Brien and I began writing letters to each other five years ago and have kept in touch ever since. I didn’t contact him as a journalist; we were both just looking for pen pals. At that time, O’Brien was 12 years into a sentence he’d received under California’s controversial “three strikes” law, following a burglary conviction. Had he been sentenced for that offense alone, he’d have been on his way home by then. But because it was his third felony, California law dictated that he spend at least 25 years behind bars, and possibly the rest of his life. So even then, he was looking to pass the time.

Last year, California’s piecemeal criminal justice reform measures started to give nonviolent offenders like O’Brien a much earlier shot at parole. I wrote him a letter of support for his hearing. While we were both disappointed by the denial, the move to CIM felt like a good omen.

“This place is like a park,” he wrote to me after arriving in March, “a lot of trees and over 30 cats running around.” For the first time in decades, O’Brien could see the outside world in motion when he gazed through the prison fence, watching traffic roll by on Chino’s Central Avenue. He marveled at makes and models that didn’t even exist the last time he’d seen cars on the road. What had happened, he wondered, to all the Camaros?

There was only one downside to CIM: sleeping in a large open hall with over 100 other men. “Really no privacy at all,” he wrote to me. “That is the only downfall.”

The sense of wonder and freedom was soon eclipsed by dread. Two days before O’Brien dated his letter to me, two CIM staff members had tested positive for Covid-19. There were few precautionary measures being taken inside the facility at the time, and nobody bothered to tell the inmates that the novel coronavirus had already breached the prison’s walls, according to O’Brien. But, as an avid reader of the news, he already knew what was coming. “It won’t be long before we are quarantined,” he wrote to me.

By the time O’Brien’s dorm was put under a quarantine in late April, CIM was undergoing a full-blown outbreak. One incarcerated person had died, and more than two-thirds of the 87 people held there who had received tests so far had tested positive. Now, according to a New York Times database, more than 1,200 cases have been connected to the facility, which had a population of about 3,500 at the beginning of the outbreak. Nineteen people incarcerated there have died. That death toll is higher than that of any other California facility besides San Quentin State Prison — and San Quentin’s outbreak was imported from CIM.

CIM was patient zero for the pandemic in California’s prisons. The facility was at 120 percent of its official capacity when its outbreak began, and about 200 particularly vulnerable inmates were transferred to other institutions in late May. But because they were only tested weeks before the transfer, they brought the virus with them. As a result, San Quentin went from being virtually virus-free to having more than a third of its population test positive. Twenty-five people incarcerated there have since died.

“I think they’re trying to ride this out. Whoever doesn’t make it doesn’t make it.”

CIM’s response to its own ballooning Covid-19 count has primarily entailed limiting inmate movement, ending outside visitation, placing infected dorms under quarantine, and isolating some of the sickest people, as well as those who test positive. But these measures have failed to contain the virus. This failure is due largely to the institution’s fundamental design: Most of the facility’s inmates live in large, open dormitories that typically hold 140-200 people in bunk beds separated by only a few feet. Just a handful of centralized sinks, showers, and toilets are shared between them. By the prison’s own accounting, CIM was overcrowded for much of the pandemic. It wasn’t until June, after the ill-fated transfers to San Quentin, that the facility’s official capacity dipped below 100 percent. Even now, consistently maintaining 6 feet between the dorms’ occupied bunks is impossible.

Internal policy has played a role too. Though inmates are forbidden from leaving quarantined dorms, CIM has elected to transfer coronavirus-positive people who have recovered from their symptoms into both quarantined and “clean” dorms. Because inmates are not typically retested after once testing positive, these frequent transfers have the potential to introduce or reintroduce the virus into new dorms. Furthermore, the non-profit Prison Law Office discovered that in one dorm elderly inmates with disabilities and severe preexisting medical conditions have been housed alongside people with active Covid-19 infections, ostensibly because there was no other accessible housing available. Incarcerated people who spoke with me and other news outlets have also faulted the facility’s failure to implement universal mask-wearing until at least the end of April, as well as its reliance on twice-daily temperature checks to identify new positive cases, in lieu of comprehensive testing.

In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, insisted that the department has been “strongly committed to responding to this public health emergency and to protecting both staff and the incarcerated population.” Among other measures, the response cited CIM’s construction of temporary housing to relieve overcrowding and increase treatment space for positive cases, its use of town hall meetings and posters to “educate” CIM’s population about Covid-19, its provision of personal sanitation supplies, and the regular screening of each housing unit by nursing staff.

But CDCR’s confidence in the thoroughness of CIM’s response does not appear to be shared by prisoners who still have to spend every day and night in a single open hall with 100 other people. When they hear announcements reminding them to engage in social distancing, while sitting on bunks 3 or 4 feet apart from each other, they can’t help but question the commitment of prison officials.

“I think they’re trying to ride this out,” O’Brien told me in July. “Whoever doesn’t make it doesn’t make it.”

Nearly 15 years later, O’Brien stared down another pandemic at CIM. Though the first two cases at the facility were staffers, the virus soon spread. The first positive inmate was identified on April 4, along with 11 more staff. By the end of the month, the virus had arrived in O’Brien’s dorm. One man, gasping for breath, was isolated, and the entire dorm was placed under quarantine. Guards told the inmates that “one of their visitors” had infected the dorm, according to O’Brien, even though outside visitation hadn’t been permitted in well over a month and the first positive cases at the facility were staff members.

As a result of quarantine, the dorm’s residents lost much of the relative freedom that their reduced custody status entailed. With no visitors allowed, they are reliant on exorbitantly expensive phone calls for contact with friends and family. They can no longer access their jobs, religious services, self-help groups, the dining hall, and recreation in the large yard with its basketball courts, baseball field, and track. Instead, if they want to get outside, dozens of men now share three tables, two benches, a handful of pull-up bars, and not much else in the dorm’s enclosed 1,650-square-foot yard. O’Brien walks as much as he can in the limited space, and alternates sitting between sun and shade. Given the 100-degree heat that’s come with summer, he feels lucky that his yard actually has a few trees.

The irony of being asked to engage in social distancing while being trapped in such close quarters was not lost on O’Brien or any of the nearly 100 other men who sleep in the same large hall. When meals are delivered, they have no choice but to eat them on their beds. The food now is often uncooked, or cold by the time it reaches the dorm, O’Brien said. (After first hearing this, I bought him a package of food items he can prepare himself while quarantined.)

“We’re still sleeping 3 feet apart from each other, but they’re encouraging social distancing,” James Menefield, who was housed in O’Brien’s dorm until this month, told me by phone. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Though CDCR claims that all CIM staff and inmates were provided with masks on April 7, Menefield and O’Brien don’t recall receiving theirs until weeks later. For at least the first two weeks in April, according to Menefield, inmates who donned DIY masks for their own safety were sometimes threatened with discipline by guards — despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially recommended universal mask-wearing at the beginning of the month.

Darrell Harris, a trained respiratory therapist incarcerated at CIM, had been telling other inmates to wear masks even before it became government policy. But, according to an account he gave the health news website Stat, a corrections officer confiscated his mask on April 1. (Face coverings are usually prohibited in prisons.) Harris appealed the disciplinary action, ultimately requesting that a judge order the facility to return his mask, require CIM corrections officers to wear masks and gloves, and provide cleaning supplies to inmates.

According to Stat, CIM adopted most of Harris’s requests as its best practices by the end of the month. However, while the CDCR spokesperson told me that CIM provides “ongoing distributions” of personal cleaning supplies (including “hospital-grade disinfectant”), Menefield and O’Brien said that they have received no such supplies, except for 8-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer and bars of soap.

The three masks provided to each incarcerated person at CIM are made from the pants legs of the orange jumpsuits inmates wear during transfers, according to O’Brien. The CDCR spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny this, noting only that the masks are “made of two layers of 100 percent cotton twill.”

While the prison dithered over the measures it would take to contain the virus in April, cases continued to rise sharply.

While the prison dithered over the measures it would take to contain the virus in April, cases continued to rise sharply. The first person incarcerated at CIM to die of the virus passed away on April 19. Still, prison staff did not regularly wear masks through early May, despite the new guidelines, according to inmates interviewed by Stat. Menefield corroborated this account.

“For a month and a half, staff were wearing masks in a discretionary manner,” he said, adding that only about a quarter of staff he observed at any given time during this period were following the guidance. (In response to questions about staff compliance, the CDCR spokesperson pointed to an April 15 memo “requiring the use of face coverings with notification that non-compliance would result in progressive discipline.”)

O’Brien, on the other hand, wore his mask religiously from the moment he received it. “I am not taking any chances,” he wrote to me the day after CIM’s first Covid-19 death. “I sleep wearing one.”

O’Brien estimates that 98 percent of inmates wear their masks regularly, and he says compliance among staff is now widespread as well (though he added that it sometimes takes the presence of their superiors to motivate some staff to comply.) Still, he pointed out, inmates can’t really wear their masks while they shower — which they do eight men at a time, with 2 feet between stalls. The reality of 100 men all eating meals on their beds poses additional challenges for containing the airborne virus.

In late April, 25 elderly and high-risk inmates were transferred out of O’Brien’s dorm and into individual single-bed cells in another building. The move was, in part, meant to finally enable social distancing in the dorm. But though the move got the dorm’s population to just under 100, it wasn’t nearly enough to create 6 feet of space between each occupied bunk.

“For every four bunks, there’s an empty bunk,” Menefield told me, “but in between those four bunks that are occupied, there’s only 3 feet of living space.”

The relief was short-lived. Within two weeks of the test, people who had been living in dorms with positive cases were being transferred into the two dorms that were considered clean — including people who had tested positive and subsequently been isolated for two weeks. Because people who tested positive once were not retested, residents of the “clean” dorms worried that the transfers could be introducing the virus into new areas of the prison.

Whether the virus was introduced through these transfers or from some other source — like staff, who were not tested by their employer until late May, and were instead asked to seek their own tests and self-report — every dorm at CIM had been infected by the end of May, and new positive cases popped up again in O’Brien’s dorm shortly after the transfers. One of these was his bunkmate. The dorm has never gone two weeks without a positive case. It’s entering its fourth month of quarantine.

The prison administers twice-daily temperature checks, to isolate potential vectors of the virus, but Menefield said that his own experience calls into question their effectiveness. On the evening of June 7, his body temperature clocked in at 101 F. He says he was instructed to return to his bunk, take Tylenol, and return for another check in an hour. By then, his temperature had normalized and he was again cleared to return to his bunk.

That night, however, prison staff shook him awake and told him to report for another temperature check. This time the reading was 103 F. A doctor ordered that Menefield be given a Covid-19 test and transferred to an isolated unit. Four days later, his results came back positive. Menefield thinks the gap between his first reading and his isolation could have put many other residents in danger.

“For seven hours after presenting with a fever, I was allowed to be around other inmates,” he told me. “Every inmate in that immediate area — within 10 bunks of me — has [since] tested positive.”

O’Brien, for his part, has not broken a fever or had any unusual respiratory difficulty since the outbreak began. He did, however, experience extreme fatigue and mild body aches in late June and spent the better part of the week doing little besides sleeping. His temperature checks came back normal, so, in the fog of sickness, he wrote it off as a depressive episode. (O’Brien has a history of bipolar disorder and depression.) He recovered after about five days. Later, when I asked him if he might have had an undetected case of Covid-19, he thought for a second and said, “It could be, I don’t know.” He added that he’d never had an illness that felt the same way. Whatever the experience was, O’Brien endured it in close proximity to dozens of other inmates.

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With only three widespread Covid-19 tests administered since the facility’s first cases appeared in March — the most recent occurred on August 6 — it’s entirely unclear the extent to which asymptomatic or partially symptomatic transmission has gone unchecked at CIM. Another potential blind spot is CIM’s decision not to retest people who have tested positive in the past. Since July, even the temperature checks have largely been limited to inmates who have only ever tested negative, according to O’Brien.

A round of testing in July revealed 13 additional positive cases in his dorm, including his new bunkmate, who had arrived in June to replace the first bunkmate who left after catching the virus. O’Brien says this new bunkmate was exhibiting symptoms for weeks prior to being tested — constantly coughing and sweating profusely — but he was not isolated until his results came back positive. Once the 13 positive cases were moved out, 15 formerly positive people were moved into the dorm to replace them. Another test in early August, too, resulted in seven new positive cases being shuffled out of O’Brien’s dorm.

The result of the facility’s piecemeal and largely unexplained mitigation measures has been the festering of low-level paranoia in the dorms. O’Brien avoids the many inmates who cough and sneeze regularly, and he eyes the formerly positive cases that get moved into his dorm with suspicion. “They’re not completely healed,” he told me. “I don’t know if you’re ever completely healed.”

A California legislator called it “the worst prison health screw-up in state history.”

Suspicion of prison authorities is even more acute. More than once, O’Brien has told me that he thinks the corrections department’s goal is to expose everyone to the virus. Menefield was slightly more circumspect. “Given all of these facts, either staff were grossly incompetent in handling this crisis, or they did this intentionally,” he told me.

CIM’s internal coronavirus policies have received relatively little publicity, but CDCR’s transfer of hundreds of inmates from CIM to other facilities without timely testing in late May was widely condemned after it caused the outbreak at San Quentin. One California legislator called it “the worst prison health screw-up in state history.” As a result, CDCR’s chief medical director was demoted to an advisory role in early July.

O’Brien points to this ousting as acknowledgment that the system is not taking appropriate measures to keep him and thousands of others incarcerated at CIM safe. But it has changed little about the day-to-day operation of the facility. The paranoia caused by the ongoing outbreak has been blunted by the continuing banality of a regimented daily life spent between the crowded dormitory and the spartan yard. The summer heat makes the air in the dorm even more stifling than usual: It’s cooled only by fans, not air conditioning, and the exhaust vent on O’Brien’s side of the building is broken. So when things start to get unbearable just after noon, he puts his head under a faucet and goes out into the yard to sit in the shade of one of the trees. He’s not as hopeful as he was when he first arrived at CIM, but he can still see the cars zooming by on Central Avenue, reminding him of what it might be like to be free — and to be able to finally prioritize his own safety the way he sees fit. He’s learned in prison that nobody else will.

The post Inside the Prison Where California’s Coronavirus Outbreak Exploded appeared first on The Intercept.

The emails depict the chamber’s environmental policy director requesting a last-minute meeting with state Rep. Jim Hoops to discuss the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, the newly minted ballot initiative allowing citizens to sue polluters on behalf of Lake Erie. A legislative aide responded quickly, scheduling a same-day meeting. Despite the chamber director’s admission that his proposal would need to be submitted after the legislature’s deadline, the aide produced draft amendment language to share with him three weeks later. The chamber’s subsequent revisions made their way into the final bill, effectively nullifying the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

“This shows the influence of the Chamber of Commerce writing our laws and undermining the democracy of the people of Toledo,” said Bill Lyons, a board member of the Ohio Community Rights Network, an environmental advocacy organization. After the May vote, Lyons filed a series of public records requests to try to figure out which lawmaker introduced the amendment. The emails were provided to The Intercept and The New Food Economy by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, an affiliate of the Ohio Community Rights Network.

In February, more than 60 percent of participants in a special election in Toledo voted to establish a Bill of Rights for Lake Erie. It was a unique ballot question that would grant Lake Erie the right to “exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.” The intent was to give Lake Erie and its human allies legal standing to file lawsuits against polluters.

Organizers in Ohio launched their efforts to pass the initiative after a toxic algal bloom — caused by fertilizer and manure runoff from upstream farms — rendered Toledo’s water undrinkable and largely unusable (some residents were advised not to shower) for a few days in 2014. Tish O’Dell, a state organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, said residents spent two years trying to persuade the state government to take action to prevent future issues.

In Ohio, however, the farm runoff largely responsible for polluting Lake Erie is minimally regulated. Farmers in the state also benefit from key legal protections that limit their vulnerability to pollution-related lawsuits. Ohio has a so-called right-to-farm law, which dramatically limits neighbors’ ability to win lawsuits alleging that farm pollution unfairly impacts their quality of life. (Hoops appears to have introduced another amendment that expands the definition of farmland protected under the state’s right-to-farm law; that amendment passed this summer as well, further narrowing the legal pathways advocates might use to limit agricultural runoff.) And at the federal level, the Clean Water Act has long exempted most agricultural operations from robust regulation.

For all these reasons, advocates came to believe that existing legal frameworks would never sufficiently protect the lake and those who live near it. By 2016, they were ready to try something new. After O’Dell and her colleague Thomas Linzey gave a presentation on so-called rights-of-nature laws at Bowling Green University, Toledo activists approached them about devising a plan for Lake Erie. The group headed to a nearby pub.

“That’s actually how the Lake Erie Bill of Rights hatched,” O’Dell said. “It was on a cocktail napkin at the bar.”

After its passage, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights was immediately challenged in federal court. The next day, the Drewes Farm Partnership had filed a 24-page lawsuit arguing that protections for the lake could mean financial ruin for the farm’s business. That lawsuit is ongoing. Then, in May, the eleventh-hour amendment invalidating the lake’s rights found its way into the House version of the state’s budget.

The Chamber of Commerce asked for the addition of text that would more directly refute the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

It all started with an email from the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. The chamber’s director of energy and environmental policy, Zack Frymier, wrote to request a meeting with Hoops, the state House representative, on April 11, a few weeks before the vote. (Hoops is chair of the Ohio House Finance Subcommittee on Agriculture, Development, and Natural Resources.)

“I’m hoping to find some time (like everyone else) to run something by Chairman Hoops regarding the Lake Erie Bill of Rights that passed in Toledo in February,” Frymier wrote. “We have some language that we’d request to be considered for the budget. Though obviously it would have to be submitted after tomorrow’s deadline we’d still like to have a conversation.”

A legislative aide replied promptly, arranging a meeting with Hoops for 4:00 p.m. that day. Despite the short notice — it was already nearly 3:00 p.m. — Frymier quickly and enthusiastically responded that he’d be there.

A few weeks later, the aide got back to Frymier with draft text of the amendment, asking if the wording made sense to him. Frymier then asked for the addition of text that would more directly refute the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

“Language in this amendment stating that [nature and ecosystems] do not have standing is essential to what we’re trying to accomplish,” Frymier wrote on May 2.

The amendment’s final text includes the additional statement Frymier asked for: “Nature or any ecosystem does not have standing to participate in or bring an action in any court of common pleas.”

The amendment was reported by local media on May 8. The next day, the state House passed its version of the bill. Lyons, the Community Rights Network board member, later testified in front of the state Senate, asking legislators to strike the amendment from the final budget. His efforts were unsuccessful and, after a few weeks of negotiation, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the measure into law.

Lyons said he was surprised by the degree of collaboration between the Chamber of Commerce and Hoops’s subcommittee. “The fact that they would run that language specifically by them — I mean, who else gets that opportunity?” he said. (Neither the Ohio Chamber of Commerce nor Hoops’s office responded to requests for comment.)

Business advocates — primarily the fossil fuel giant BP, which has fracking interests in the state — spent more than $300,000 to campaign against the Lake Erie Bill of Rights prior to its passage in Toledo. The coalition advocating in its favor, Toledoans for Safe Water, spent less than $6,000, according to Great Lakes Now.

Municipalities around the nation have been slowly adopting rights-of-nature ordinances for more than a decade. Pittsburgh banned fracking using this legal framework in 2010. More recently, a county in Oregon voted to ban aerial pesticide spraying the same way.

Rights-of-nature laws likely face a long road ahead. If the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is any indication, many may be tied up in lawsuits for years to come.

For O’Dell, the Ohio organizer, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is already a win regardless of its fate. “The people kept fighting to get it on the ballot. They defeated big corporate money. They won, and they’re still fighting,” she said. “So I don’t care what happens — they have ignited interest all around the world.”

Update: August 29, 2019, 4:55 p.m. ET
This piece has been updated to clarify the level of spending in favor of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights and to include Thomas Linzey as a co-presenter of O’Dell’s presentation promoting rights of nature.

The post How Ohio’s Chamber of Commerce Killed an Anti-Pollution Bill of Rights appeared first on The Intercept.

“It was martial law,” Hathaway said. “That left a nasty taste in my mouth. All we were doing was feeding a new form of hate.”

Still, Hathaway followed orders and earned a number of awards for his military service, including the Good Conduct Medal, which is given to recognize “good behavior and faithful service.” But after half a decade in uniform, Hathaway was given a bad conduct discharge in February 2005. He got the boot after failing a Department of Defense drug test administered shortly after a rowdy weekend in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Among other things, this denied him access to mental health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

For years, veterans advocates and policymakers have worked to open the VA to the half-million so-called bad paper veterans like Hathaway. Last year, Congress directed the VA to offer more mental health care benefits to this neglected population. For Hathaway, however, it was too little and too late.

“The military threw me to the wolves,” Hathaway told The Intercept. “I couldn’t get counseling. I was abandoned by them.” Desperate for help, Hathaway visited his local VA hospital in Phoenix and would occasionally receive care on humanitarian grounds.

It was September 9, 2015, at around 10:30 a.m. when Hathaway, then 34, entered the hospital looking somewhat disheveled. The temperature outside had already hit 93 degrees Fahrenheit and would continue to climb. He was wearing a whimsical green T-shirt emblazoned with the Tootsie Pop slogan, “How many licks does it take?”

A hospital staffer quickly recognized Hathaway from a previous visit, deemed him a trespasser, and alerted the Veterans Affairs Police of his presence. According to a police report, three officers quickly showed up and tried to arrest Hathaway, who resisted. In the scuffle, Hathaway allegedly kicked officers and bit one’s right thumb.

Once handcuffed, Hathaway was forced into a wheelchair and hauled to a cramped holding cell in the hospital. First, two officers grabbed him by the shirt, rammed his face and body into the back wall of the cell, then threw him to the ground, according to a lawsuit Hathaway filed later. Grainy video surveillance appears to corroborate this account, and it shows that three officers proceeded to pile on top of him. Hathaway alleged that in this pile-on, Sgt. Joshua Fister strangled him. (Though the video footage itself appears inconclusive on this point, police photos taken after the incident show red marks around Hathaway’s neck). Hathaway was ultimately left sprawled out on the floor, bruised and bleeding from a 2-inch gash on his head. At some point during the melee, one of the officers stepped in a puddle of Hathaway’s blood, which he tracked into an exterior hallway.

The hospital visit resulted in five criminal charges against Hathaway, including felony aggravated assault of a police officer. The assault charge stuck, and he served 16 months in prison, which upended his life and recovery.

After he got out of prison, the husky former Marine filed his suit against the VA, alleging that its officers used excessive force. Late last year, the VA settled with Hathaway for $25,000, according to his lawyer, Charles Piccuta. (A spokesperson for the Phoenix VA noted that the settlement “included no admission of liability or fault on the VA’s part.”)

Fister, the cop who allegedly choked Hathaway, has also faced a previous allegation of excessive force: A former VA police officer in Phoenix said that two months before Hathaway’s arrest he witnessed Fister choke a different veteran patient who, just prior to the incident, was expressing suicidal intent but “wasn’t being disruptive” or violent in any way.

“His eyeballs were popping out of his head; he was turning another color,” said the officer, an Army veteran who remains in law enforcement and requested anonymity to avoid adverse professional consequences.

These images of Derrick Hathaway were included in a police report produced after his arrest in September 2015. Photos: Phoenix Veterans Affairs Police Department

The officer said he reported the incident to his deputy chief and the hospital director. Correspondence reviewed by The Intercept shows that he also informed the FBI. While the VA Office of Inspector General launched an inquiry, the whistleblowing officer said he was never interviewed. (When asked for comment, the VA OIG provided a statement saying that it does not comment on “investigations it may or may not have completed involving an individual.”) After news of the officer’s complaints leaked into the lower ranks of the department, other cops harassed the whistleblower, threatened him, and keyed his car.

“It comes down to the thin blue line: Officers don’t want to tell on other officers,” said the whistleblower, who left the department in December 2016.

Piccuta told The Intercept that all five officers accused of causing Hathaway’s injuries, including Fister, remain on the VA police force. In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson at the Phoenix VA provided a statement emphasizing Hathaway’s behavior and subsequent assault conviction. The spokesperson did not make Fister available for comment, and messages left at voice mailboxes and email addresses associated with his name were not returned.

Shocking reports of police violence against elderly patients at VA facilities have emerged in recent years.

The allegations against Fister do not appear to be exceptional. Shocking reports of excessive violence against veteran patients, many of them elderly, have emerged in recent years. They include then-71-year-old Vietnam veteran Jose Olivia, who in 2016 was tackled to the ground and arrested by VA police in El Paso after setting off a metal detector. The attack, captured on a surveillance camera, resulted in shoulder and throat injuries that required surgery. The same year, Marine veteran Danny Ralph and his service dog were both slammed to the ground by VA police in Spokane, Washington. Police charged Ralph, then 60, with disorderly conduct, contending that he refused to keep his dog outside the facility despite repeated requests.

Violent incidents like these can have fatal consequences. In 2014, the VA paid out a $500,000 settlement to the family of Jonathan Montano, a veteran who died following a physical altercation with police at the VA hospital in Loma Linda, California. Police ruptured Montano’s carotid artery, which resulted in blood clotting and a stroke. Last May, a 66-year-old veteran named Dale Farhner died following a physical struggle with VA police in Kansas City, Missouri. Police detained Farhner because he was apparently driving the wrong way down one of the hospital’s driveways, according to the Kansas City Star. One year later, the VA still has not released any information on Farhner’s death despite requests from the Star, Missouri’s U.S. Senate delegation, and Farhner’s family.

Protecting Those Who Served

Today, nearly 4,200 Veterans Affairs police officers are stationed at 139 VA medical centers across the country. These cops are tasked with keeping order on VA grounds and overseeing a patient population that includes many highly trained ex-military members with psychological trauma. The force’s motto is “Protecting Those Who Served.” Yet for Hathaway and scores of other veterans, that maxim hasn’t matched the reality on the ground.

After reviewing internal police reports, legal documents, and local news reports spanning the past 10 years, The Intercept has identified dozens of credible allegations that VA cops in every corner of the United States have neglected standard police procedures, violated patients’ constitutional rights, or broken the law. In the course of their duties, they have beaten veterans, bungled sensitive investigations, falsified arrest reports, conducted improper searches, and ignored basic procedures, like reading citizens their Miranda rights.

It’s impossible at present to determine the prevalence of misconduct among VA police and how that might compare to other law enforcement agencies — largely because of the department’s own failures. According to a sweeping December report from the VA’s Office of Inspector General, the VA “did not have adequate and coordinated governance over its police program to ensure effective management and oversight for its approximately 4,000-strong police officer workforce.” The OIG found that forces at roughly three out of every four facilities were not receiving timely inspections. Further, the sparse data collected on police activities was not tracked or assessed in any systematic or rigorous way.

In other words, even if it’s unclear how prevalent misconduct is among VA police, it does seem apparent that the department’s lack of oversight structures stacks the deck against accountability and in favor of impunity.

While the VA police force was formally classified as a federal law enforcement body in 1991, its officers were not issued firearms for nearly a decade. But the VA soon provided its cops with the tools of modern American policing, partnering with the Pentagon as part of its highly controversial 1033 program, which provides military-grade equipment to police departments across the county. Between 2005 and 2014, VA police departments acquired millions of dollars’ worth of body armor, chemical agents, night vision equipment, and other weapons and tactical gear.

VA police in every corner of the U.S. have neglected standard procedures, violated patients’ constitutional rights, or broken the law.

Despite this windfall, VA police face critical staffing shortages and are often unable to uphold their basic mission of ensuring security on hospital grounds. (As of late last year, 40 percent of all VA police departments had an officer vacancy rate above 20 percent.) In the past year, the OIG has identified a half-dozen facilities where police failure to carry out required safety procedures “resulted in a lack of assurance of a safe environment for patients and staff.” In one typical example from an inspection of a VA hospital in Marion, Illinois, investigators found that police weren’t remedying problems with the hospital’s panic alarm system. They also had not addressed longstanding security deficiencies at the hospital’s pharmacy, which put it “at risk for potential loss or theft of medications.”

The officers themselves appear to receive as little scrutiny as the security issues they’re supposed to monitor: Oversight of the cops is sparse, decentralized, and split between local hospital leaders and a dysfunctional, Washington-based body called the Office of Security and Law Enforcement. The December OIG report identified significant internal confusion regarding OS&LE, with VA officials believing it to be the agency’s police watchdog despite the fact that the office lacks authority to hold departments “accountable for adhering to police program policies.”

One of the office’s main responsibilities is inspecting departments. Yet the OIG found that beginning in 2014, OS&LE had just six full-time staffers tasked with inspections and oversight of VA police. By 2017, three of these employees had been diverted to other roles. (Since the OIG released its report, the department has provided OS&LE with 10 additional staffers.) Because of staffing constraints, OS&LE did not provide timely inspections for 74 percent of VA medical facilities.

In response to The Intercept’s inquiries, a department spokesperson said that the VA police force is currently undergoing reforms based on the OIG’s findings. Specifically, the department has hired a senior security officer and 18 regional security managers to identify challenges, review inspection reports, and promote hiring and retention. The department will also soon pilot new software designed to continuously assess the state of physical security at department hospitals and recommend improvements. The spokesperson added that inspection times have improved, in large part because OS&LE has hired additional staffers.

The OIG’s 2018 report was the latest in a string of embarrassing inquiries dating back to the late 1980s. Some of the most shocking findings came in a 2011 Government Accountability Office report that found that many of the nearly 300 sexual assault allegations reported to the VA police since January 2007 were not passed on to the OIG — in violation of departmental regulations — or to VA leadership.

Last winter’s report was spurred, in part, by a wave of police complaints pouring into congressional offices. Earlier this year, Congress directed the Government Accountability Office to further investigate the VA police, and two weeks ago, lawmakers on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs grilled VA officials on police misconduct in their districts.

“It’s hard for me to sit here and answer questions after hearing the stories that you’re talking about,” Renee Oshinski, an acting deputy under secretary at the VA, told lawmakers. “We have to go back and question whether or not the things that we are doing are being effective.”

Corruption in the Capital

In April 2017, shortly after Tony Hebert became the Washington D.C. VA’s new acting police chief, he held a meeting with his officers in a conference room near the hospital’s dental clinic. Many hoped that he would conduct a much-needed cleaning of their dirty department: Two years earlier, two dozen current and former cops had taken the extraordinary step of suing their then-chief Jerry Brown on the grounds that he had secretly installed surveillance equipment, including in changing rooms used by men and women, and snooped on staffers. According to the complaint, Brown “conspired” to spy on staff with the VA Medical Center’s then-director, Brian Hawkins, whose tenure at the hospital was scarred by a damning OIG report that found hospital leaders were upholding a “culture of complacency” that led to serious lapses in the quality of care. (An attorney representing Brown and Hawkins did not respond to requests for comment.)

The reform-minded officers’ optimism was short-lived. In his introductory remarks, Hebert made clear that if anyone on the force interfered with his leadership, he would “roll the fuck over us,” according to a complaint later submitted by Officer Jeremy Balzan to the Department of Justice. According to an administrative complaint submitted by Capt. Luis Rodriguez, during multiple meetings, Hebert slammed his badge on a table and yelled, “I am the fucking chief of police! I have a gold badge; you have silver badges. You will do what I say, or I will fucking fire your asses!”

One of Hebert’s first acts as police chief was hiring a man he later described as his “best friend,” according to Rodriguez’s complaint. Alfred Coburn was hired as one of three new captains at the time, but job postings appear to indicate that only two of those positions were publicly listed. If Hebert hired Coburn for an unlisted position, as Balzan suggested in a formal grievance, it could mean that he violated federal hiring rules. (In an interview with The Intercept, Hebert categorically denied this and all other allegations against him.)

VA police in Washington, D.C., allege that they were repeatedly ordered to falsify training records, dispatch journals, and police reports.

But crony hiring is just one of the many allegations of misconduct that have since dogged Hebert. Balzan, Rodriguez, and two other VA cops who requested anonymity for fear of adverse professional consequences told The Intercept that Hebert repeatedly ordered officers to falsify training records, dispatch journals, and police reports, often in order to make charges less severe and to suggest that criminal activity had been curtailed on his watch. Specific incidents are documented in Balzan’s complaint, which alleges that Coburn also ordered changes to a police report in one instance and falsified reports himself in others.

The OS&LE later documented a plethora of bookkeeping irregularities in the D.C. department, from late and illegible firearms and ammunition records to training sheets that were filled out before said training had occurred. It also found that the department’s investigative reports frequently left out key details and suggested the police work was often not thorough enough to “determine whether a crime has been committed.” At least one report cited a witness statement that was never produced. Two reports of sexual assault made against D.C. staffers were not appropriately investigated by VA police. In one of those instances, the survivor was never even interviewed.

Balzan claims that one day while he was monitoring closed-circuit surveillance footage in October 2017, he witnessed Coburn visiting the department on his day off with a woman the DOJ complaint identified as his girlfriend. After parking illegally on the emergency room ramp, he entered the hospital, had an employee print an incident report from weeks prior, and filed a revised report. In addition to restructuring narrative details, Coburn also added felony charges against the subject of the report, who had stated his desire to file a complaint against Coburn, according to the statement Balzan submitted to the DOJ.

Ironically enough, Balzan and another VA police officer said they witnessed closed-circuit footage of Coburn using excessive force on a government employee over a parking violation just one month after his own unorthodox parking job. The individual allegedly parked at the VA while going to pick up his mother at a nearby clinic. After Coburn and another officer approached the individual, he fled and was eventually taken down by the officers. The department’s subsequent use of force review faulted Coburn’s actions as “in violation of the subject’s Fourth Amendment rights.”  (In the review, Coburn claimed that the subject tripped.)

Finding little recourse to address misconduct internally, Balzan organized nine cops and administrative staffers to sign onto his DOJ complaint. His efforts came on the heels of an August 2017 OS&LE inspection that found the D.C. department was “not operating in a satisfactory manner.”

Under fire and with the specter of accountability on the horizon, Hebert made good on his inaugural promise to punish the police who had gone against him, according to the four officers who spoke to The Intercept. Balzan said he filed his first grievance after Hebert removed him from his detective position and put him on dispatch duty on the grounds that he had failed a firearms test — despite the fact that other cops who performed at a similar level were given additional training and testing and allowed to stay in their positions. Balzan said his pay was reduced by at least $5,000 as a result of the reassignment. He continued to file complaints and said he received threats from Hebert, as well as an anonymous email that stated, “Resign while you can before you get fired.”

Rodriguez, meanwhile, shared concerns with a union official that Hebert was targeting whistleblowing cops in order to remove or demote them, and he wrote a statement for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in support of Balzan. In December 2017, Rodriguez received a letter from the hospital director proposing his termination on the vague grounds of “failure to meet conditions of employment.”

“There’s no way we can do our jobs when they keep us underneath their thumbs,” Rodriguez said. “It feels like VA leaders are untouchable.”

Coburn and Hebert, meanwhile, remained essentially unscathed. Last summer, they moved to new positions at a VA police department in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. While Coburn is still on the force, Hebert recently left the VA. According to LinkedIn, Hebert had a short stint at a private security company that does business with the VA and is now the Virginia director of security solutions for another private firm, Bri-Bet Group, according to its website.

A spokesperson for the D.C. VA said that a new permanent police chief and hospital director are putting the facility “on a new path” and remediating the problems identified by the OS&LE. The spokesperson declined to address specific allegations against Hebert and Coburn without their consent. In a brief phone call, Coburn declined to speak about his VA work. “You can print whatever the hell you want,” he told The Intercept. “I don’t really care what happens.”

In an interview, Hebert said he was a “very successful chief” who earned outstanding performance evaluations, though he declined to provide them to The Intercept. He said he was targeted for being a white chief in a mostly black department.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

The retaliation alleged in D.C. is not uncommon. Last summer, the GAO found that VA whistleblowers are 10 times more likely to be disciplined than their peers. Two months before the report, the Daily Caller published a story highlighting the plight of four VA police whistleblowers. These cops and others who spoke with The Intercept say their actions spurred specious counterinvestigations, relegation to desk duty, unfair annual evaluations, and other retaliatory actions that jeopardized their jobs or made promotions impossible. Three cops from different departments told The Intercept that administrators illegally accessed their medical files in attempts to uncover dirt and write blackmail.

At the VA hospital in Saginaw, Michigan, Air Force veteran and VA Officer Mary Baker told The Intercept that she brought forth allegations that cops on the force were routinely making blatantly racist remarks and having casual conversations about rape. While her allegations were largely affirmed following an internal investigation — which found that “Police Service Leadership supported a culture of allowing inappropriate behavior (public simulated sex acts, racial slurs, etc.)” — Baker said the findings were disregarded, and the offending officers even continued to receive promotions. As one of two women on the force, Baker said her qualifications are consistently questioned, and she continues to face sexist behavior.

In a statement provided to The Intercept, a VA spokesperson in Saginaw said, “The allegations were investigated, processes were followed, and appropriate action has been taken.” She confirmed that three of the five cops who Baker claimed engaged in inappropriate behavior remain VA officers.

Officer Tim Petoskey, who spoke with both the Daily Caller and The Intercept, alleged that police leaders at the Seattle VA engaged in gross mismanagement, rampant discrimination, and illegal searches of veteran patients. Petoskey’s specific allegations, which were later corroborated in a 2015 internal investigation, included instances of cops referring to black VA employees with the “N-word” or describing them as “fucking monkeys.” Cops were found to have engaged in a litany of additional misconduct, from sloppy budgeting and unfair hiring practices to misplacing hundreds of police reports.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Petoskey told The Intercept. “My pay is messed up. My work orders for equipment get lost. I’ve been passed up for promotions. More troubling, our major forms of redress … are taking VA’s cartoonish excuses for this retaliatory behavior as valid.”

In response to The Intercept’s inquiries, a department spokesperson said the hospital “thoroughly investigated” the allegations and “fixed all of the identified issues.”

“As a result of that investigation, four officers — none of whom still work for VA — left the VA Puget Sound police before any discipline could be administered,” the spokesperson said.

Qualified to Serve?

The VA police force has long struggled to recruit and retain clean, qualified cops. In 1988, the VA’s inspector general found that 57 percent of department officers surveyed were unqualified, unsuited, or both, including 21 police officers who did not disclose prior criminal convictions on their applications for VA employment. In 1989, the VA created the OS&LE in part to address this shortcoming.

Today, prospective VA police are required to submit to a criminal history check, a drug test, and a medical examination. But because the department is desperate to fill its many vacancies, it seems to many on the force that some qualifications are requirements in name only. In September 2017, the department issued a policy advisory that allows police to be given interim credentials before a background investigation by the Office of Personnel Management is completed. (In response to questions about officer vacancy rates and retention, a VA spokesperson told The Intercept that the department has added a net total of 402 officers since 2014.)

At least one officer with serious professional blemishes has risen quite high in the force: the D.C. VA’s deputy chief, Roger Lindsay, who, according to court documents, was indicted by a grand jury in 2004 on charges of intimidating and threatening witnesses to extract statements for a murder investigation while working as a municipal police officer in Brazil, Indiana. (The charge was dismissed on appeal due to the statute of limitations.) Lindsay also purchased a fake MBA degree and submitted it as part of an application to be a police chief at a department in Florida. The OS&LE’s report on D.C. police noted that when Lindsay was under consideration for a job, the VA did not exhaustively examine his previous five years in law enforcement, per departmental requirements. (A spokesperson for the D.C. VA said the hospital is “conducting a top-to-bottom review of Lindsay’s hiring,” which was made under Hebert’s direction; through the spokesperson, Lindsay declined to be interviewed.)

The department’s centralized training academy in Little Rock, Arkansas, is its primary attempt to professionalize its police. Yet the standardized training for VA cops today lasts just 400 hours, which falls significantly below training requirements for many local cops, which vary by jurisdiction. Massachusetts, for example, requires 900 hours of training to become an officer. And despite the unique challenges that VA officers face in dealing with veteran patients, the curriculum focuses little on how to police in this environment.

The academy dedicates only two hours total to “veteran-centered policing,” one hour to “crisis intervention,” and one hour to “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Despite a recent series of shocking suicides on hospital grounds, would-be VA cops are given just one three-hour lecture on “suicide awareness and prevention,” according to the 2019 training curriculum, which was obtained by The Intercept in a public records request.

“When I came out of the academy, I was stupider than when I went in.”

The training is held in uniformly low esteem by the officers who spoke to The Intercept. Charles Harrington, a VA police officer out of Bay Pines, Florida, said a lot of his colleagues “do not have the appropriate legal foundation” to serve, while Officer Ghassan Ghannoum of the West Los Angeles VA bluntly said, “When I came out of the academy, I was stupider than when I went in.”

In response to The Intercept’s inquiries, a spokesperson for the VA pointed to the academy’s accreditation by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Accreditation Board and claimed that it has a “reputation for excellence” among other federal law enforcement agencies that hold trainings there.

Inadequate training may account for the lackluster execution of much day-to-day police work. One troubling finding highlighted in the OIG’s winter report was that officers at the Chicago VA were not consistently advising suspects of their constitutional rights during arrest.

VA police officers across the country have been found to repeatedly issue federal charges with scant evidence for minor violations, a practice that can cause legal headaches and significant bills. The VA police force in Pittsburgh, for instance, has charged hospital employees with disorderly conduct, receiving stolen property, tampering with evidence, and invasion of privacy — charges that were later withdrawn or dismissed in Allegheny County District Court. In 2017, Tampa Bay’s NPR station WUSF found that VA police were taking veteran patients to federal court over small infractions, from parking tickets to spitting.

A VA police detective in Seattle acknowledged to OIG investigators that shoddy police work led to legitimate cases being dropped. Lawyers said that police routinely wrote poor reports that misstated statutes and didn’t properly justify probable cause for actions. One staffer inside the local U.S. Attorney’s Office simply described the Seattle department as a “hot mess.”

The Big, Powerful Men

In October 2017, Navy veteran Juan Victoria, a nurse at the VA hospital in Fayetteville, Arkansas, was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after expressing his intention to report improper behavior by a VA police officer.

Victoria said an officer named Jeff Eye came into the hospital’s triage room, told a patient that his car was parked illegally, and demanded that he move it immediately. Victoria, who was the nursing supervisor that night, told Eye that his actions had violated various laws and regulations, including the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which guarantees patients uninterrupted access to emergency care.

“I was advocating for the patient and the VA,” Victoria told The Intercept. “If the patient had left the triage room before being evaluated by a physician and experienced a serious medical event, we would have had no justification for why the patient was taken out of the ER. We would have been held liable.”

Victoria said his words angered Eye, and a scuffle ensued. In a statement Victoria drafted and sent to VA administrators hours later, he said Eye and another VA cop “took hold of my arms and forcefully took me to the ground, hitting the left side of my forehead and my right knee while also damaging my glasses and phone. … One of the officers put what felt like his knee on my back and neck.” Victoria was arrested, placed in a holding cell, and charged. According to local union officials, his arrest was the second violent incident between VA cops and nursing staff in two months and a violation of the police’s code of conduct.

A spokesperson at the facility provided the following statement on behalf of the VA: “The incident at the center of this inquiry involved an employee who improperly intervened in a police matter and refused to comply with a police officer’s instructions despite repeated warnings. The Veterans Health Care System of the Ozarks investigated this incident thoroughly and found that the officer’s use of force was appropriate.” Attempts to reach Eye by phone and email were unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, after Victoria’s congressperson, Republican Steve Womack, intervened with an inquiry on his constituent’s behalf, all of Victoria’s charges were quickly dropped.

“Every time I see that cop now, he smiles at me,” Victoria told The Intercept. “In his mind he thinks he’s taught me a lesson — not to mess with the big, powerful men: the cops.”

The post Veterans Affairs Police Are Supposed to “Protect Those Who Served.” They Have a Shocking Record of Brutality and Impunity. appeared first on The Intercept.

Something like this happened in the city where I grew up. In 2014, a group of leading economists released a report showing that Charlotte, North Carolina, ranked dead last among major U.S. cities when it came to the upward mobility of its poorest residents. Two years later, there was an uprising — hundreds of people flooded the streets, including the city’s main freeway, in protest. The catalyst was the fatal police shooting of the black motorist Keith Scott, but the underlying reasons were decades of segregation, deprivation, and immiseration inscribed into the very architecture of city governance.

If the link to Plato seems trite, it might be because we are not asking the right question. It’s not so much whether dead philosophers have something to teach us about contemporary politics. The question is rather how the struggles of the living can illuminate political theory’s most basic questions.

In “What Is Democracy?,” the philosophical is judged against the everyday — and the two harmonize in surprising ways.

The new film “What Is Democracy?,” directed by Astra Taylor, appears in its opening moments to be taking the former approach: The title fades in dramatically over a beautiful Athenian vista, and we soon find ourselves listening in on a group of philosophers discussing the Republic over a picnic among the ruins of Plato’s academy. As the scene shifts, though, from ancient Athens to more contemporary locales (including Charlotte in the wake of its uprising) — and the cast shifts from academics to workers, activists, and refugees — it quickly becomes clear that the present will not be cited simply to confirm dead philosophers’ ideas about the way things are. Instead, Taylor asks people who are living today to refine and improve those ideas.

As both an organizer involved in day-to-day campaigns for economic justice and a filmmaker who uses the medium to explore more metaphysical questions, Taylor is well-positioned to keep philosophy grounded in the world as it is. (Disclosure: In 2018, Taylor participated in an Intercept podcast pilot with Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.) Her previous film, “Examined Life” (2008), features leading philosophers explaining the applicability of their thinking against worldly backdrops: Judith Butler walks through San Francisco’s gentrifying Mission District; Cornel West rides through Manhattan in Taylor’s Volvo; and Slavoj Zizek digs through a London garbage dump.

The tagline for “Examined Life” — “philosophy is in the streets” — could just as easily belong to “What Is Democracy?,” which premieres Wednesday. But this time, Taylor poses the titular question not just to famous thinkers, but to all manner of democratic subjects: activists, former politicians, college Republicans, Syrian refugees, an immigrant workers’ cooperative, black schoolchildren, and Miami beachgoers, among others.

“I tried to approach everyone I met as if they were theorists,” Taylor recently wrote. The philosophical is judged against the everyday — and the two harmonize in surprising ways.

For a film with such a cerebral premise, “What Is Democracy?” often seems preoccupied with the human condition on a bodily level. Even the academic opening casts the so-called crisis of democracy in bodily terms. “What we’re faced with,” the philosopher Eleni Perdikouri proposes, “is the need to re-member this dismembered society.” (The film then cuts to a Trump rally in North Carolina.)

“What we’re faced with is the need to re-member this dismembered society.”

This emphasis on the bodily is present in the filmmaking itself: The handheld cinematography produces a kind of parallel conversation with the gestures of the subjects, embodying the Socratic dialogue that Taylor is carrying out with them. The most engaging scene takes place in a Miami barbershop, as a barber relays his reflections on his nine years in prison while giving a remarkably patient customer a full shave and haircut. The easy, silent intimacy and trust between the barber and customer stands in stark contrast with the description of prison’s abject cruelties, in which the body is no longer one’s own.

During a question-and-answer session accompanying an advance screening, Taylor said she was surprised by just how often personal safety and security came up when she asked people about democracy, by just how physical even this loftiest of concepts could seem to the average democratic subject. The tension between freedom and bodily security is a famous problem of political philosophy, but it’s not clear from Taylor’s exploration that the two are actually in conflict.

Her roundtable with a group of Miami schoolchildren, for example, gets off to a slow start. The children are asked what they think of democracy, and they initially look mystified. (Those of us who have been trapped in a typical U.S. classroom can easily imagine why.) Then the conversation turns to school lunch. The students passionately, articulately denounce the tyrannical way that access to hot food is curtailed by school authorities, and formerly blank faces become animated by looks and gestures of recognition and assent. Democracy appears suddenly as an impromptu exercise in mutual understanding and care.

Midway through “What Is Democracy?,” the political theorist Wendy Brown identifies Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the modern philosopher who departed most starkly from the individualist views held by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, who famously prioritized bodily security above all else. Rousseau believed that humans could transcend their individual needs and flourish through the kind of collective self-determination that we now identify with successful democratic movements.

Yet Rousseau believed that this flourishing did not come naturally. Too many aspects of modern life cut against the inclination to think and act in a collective manner, encouraging us instead to think of ourselves as atomized individuals. Thus, a paradox: Only a people with a democratic orientation can produce a democracy, but a democratic orientation can only come about from genuine experience with democracy. “How do you make democracy out of an undemocratic people?” Brown asks. “That’s our problem today.”

The audience may not step out of “What Is Democracy?” with a pat answer to its title question, but the film does give us some insight into Rousseau’s paradox. After watching Taylor’s careful Socratic engagement with her diverse array of interlocutors, it’s hard to feel like there’s a paradox at all. She may find a dearth of democratic institutions and support for her many subjects — the formerly incarcerated, children from poor families, refugees — but she does not find a want of democratic culture.

In almost every conversation, an insistent civic mindedness and recognition of some larger, inclusive group of diverse people — what might be called the social body — eventually comes to the fore. If these aren’t the seeds of democratic culture, then I don’t know what is. In Taylor’s hands, bringing out this culture is a matter of giving people the time, space, and comfort they need to feel recognized. And, finally, a matter of asking the right questions.

The post From Athens to North Carolina, Filmmaker Astra Taylor Asks: “What Is Democracy?” appeared first on The Intercept.

The new legislation enshrines in state law outgoing Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial policy of forcing many food stamp applicants to submit to drug testing. It also limits the incoming administration’s ability to walk back the state’s strict new work requirements for aid recipients. After Walker’s approval, Wisconsin will be the only state that requires drug testing for non-felon food stamp applicants.

The bill appears to defy federal policy regarding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as the food stamps program is now known. The U.S. Department of Agriculture does not allow states to impose certain eligibility limits, like drug testing, on SNAP applicants without explicit permission. Walker sued the Obama administration for permission to implement drug screenings back in 2015, but a judge threw out the lawsuit on procedural grounds. Walker then sought permission from the incoming Trump administration in 2016, but his letter went unanswered. (Leaked emails in April of this year showed that the USDA was considering allowing states to implement drug testing, but such a policy has not yet been announced.)

Lacking federal permission, the Walker administration announced a workaround last December: an administrative rule requiring drug screenings only for participants in the state’s Employment and Training Program. (The specific process involves a preliminary screening followed by testing in some cases.)

Effectively, however, this move instituted drug screening for all unemployed food stamp recipients: Wisconsinites hoping to stay on food stamps for longer than three months are required to either prove employment or enroll in the training program in order to keep their benefits. If participants fail to find work or enroll in the program, the consequences are severe. They’re banned from receiving food stamps for nearly three years. The USDA has not intervened to block this policy, but it is expected to face legal challenges.

The employment program does not have a proven track record of placing participants in jobs. According to Wisconsin Public Radio, just over a third of job seekers referred to the program wind up finding employment. (This summer, Walker vetoed a measure that would have required an evaluation of the program.) It has, however, had lots of success kicking people off food stamps. More than 100,000 people have lost their benefits after failing to meet work requirements since 2015, according to the Washington Post.

Tens of thousands of those people live in Milwaukee County, where Sherrie Tussler works as executive director of Hunger Task Force, a food bank. “We’re torturing poor people in the Dairy State, and we’re doing it with intent and doing it with malice,” she said. Tussler called Wisconsin’s system a “giant government boondoggle,” where access to aid is difficult even for applicants who closely follow the many rules. “The biggest battle is proving to the state that you did the work requirement,” she said.

Thanks to drug testing and new work requirements, the number of people losing their benefits will likely grow in the coming year. Earlier this year, Wisconsin passed a set of bills that would increase work requirements from 20 hours per week to 30. The state also moved to require parents of school-aged children to work in order to receive food stamps. (They were previously exempt.)

These two policies — drug testing and work requirements — will work in tandem to deny more people food stamp access in Wisconsin. The new work requirements, arguably the most severe in the nation, will send people to the employment and training program in droves. All those people will be required to submit to drug screenings if they want to keep their benefits. And now, neither of these policies can be undone by a future administration. They have to be repealed by law.

Since Walker began implementing work requirements in 2015, the number of food stamp recipients in Wisconsin has plummeted by nearly 20 percent from 800,000 to 650,000, according to the Washington Post. This new legislation virtually ensures that decline will continue, even as voters rebuke the state’s Republican Party.

To compound matters, Wednesday’s legislation also entrenches new work requirements for Medicaid recipients. Last month, the Trump administration granted Walker’s request for a waiver that would allow him to impose 20-hour weekly minimum work requirements on many Medicaid applicants. The new legislation gives the legislature, which will still be controlled by Republicans, oversight in this federal waiver process. That means that Evers, the incoming governor, cannot walk back the already-approved new work requirements for Medicaid.

Wisconsin functions as a test case for the Trump administration’s agenda on welfare reform. With its strict work requirements and embrace of unproven employment training programs, its recent reforms align closely with provisions that the Republican House of Representatives tried unsuccessfully to tack onto this year’s Farm Bill.

The broad appeal of Wisconsin’s approach among Republicans is largely ideological. “It stigmatizes benefit receipt,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a director at the Center for Law and Social Policy. “It’s designed to reinforce the stereotype that people need help because of their poor personal choices, as opposed to an economy of low wages and unstable jobs.”

The post Buried in Wisconsin Republicans’ Lame-Duck Legislation: Drug Testing Requirements for Food Stamp Applicants appeared first on The Intercept.

Are Facebook’s problems a perversion of tech’s utopian promise, or are they a logical outcome of the structure of the internet and its products? A new book by writer, technologist, and artist James Bridle suggests the latter. “New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future” argues that it is precisely the core purpose of the internet — the combination of high-speed computation and global networking — that is largely responsible for the ascendance of invasive data mining, “fake news,” and mass surveillance. In other words, the internet has not been corrupted by nefarious influences. Instead, more than ever, it is operating according to its central principles and imperatives. And in doing so, it is both clouding our understanding of the world around us and making that world more dangerous.

One seemingly mundane example demonstrates Bridle’s argument in miniature. Thanks to the internet, I can get a weather forecast anywhere, at any time. This forecast may end up being wrong, and I may end up stuck in a downpour, but I appreciate the feeling that I stepped outside with the best information available to me. The worst that can happen is I get a little wet.

A new book argues that technology is both clouding our understanding of the world around us and making that world more dangerous.

Bridle demonstrates the profound ways that I am in error. Weather forecasting, like all types of predictive computation, ultimately assumes that the future will be like the past. It synthesizes data points from the past into projections for the future. However, the rapid acceleration of global climate change means that this kind of computational forecasting is less and less accurate over the long term. The future is less and less like the past.

Not only that, but the act of computational forecasting itself — an enormously energy-intensive enterprise on the scale that we’re now doing it — actually contributes to the decrease in its own accuracy because of all the carbon emissions it requires. This is why, as Bridle writes, “computation is both a victim of and a contributor to climate change.” Every time I refresh a forecast, I make a small contribution to reducing its accuracy by contributing to climate change, which is already unleashing unpredictable weather patterns and wreaking havoc on the world. So in the short term, I may avoid rain. In the long term, much of my city will be underwater.

This is how the internet as we currently know it leads us into what Bridle calls the “New Dark Age”: It internalizes assumptions about the way the world is and should be, but renders invisible its own contributions to a more volatile future. And as the future begins to diverge from the past upon which it is modeled, we may well find ourselves knowing less about the world rather than more.

One reason for this, according to Bridle, is that the architecture that led to the internet was never intended to produce disinterested knowledge. For instance, meteorological computation itself was developed by an Anglo-American military-business alliance for the specific purpose of providing Western powers with strategic air and nuclear supremacy in the Cold War. (The midcentury architects of this enterprise later constituted the core of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. government entity that pioneered the internet as we know it.) To assume that the extension of these technologies to the broader public can be severed from the imperatives under which they were developed — namely, the hegemony of Western capital and the profit-maximizing of its corporations — is naive. Instead, our use of these technologies contributes to a world in which those very assumptions are further and further entrenched.

Each chapter of “New Dark Age” provides a different lens that reveals how deeply these imperatives have permeated our social relationships and how opaque they have rendered actual knowledge. The chapter on “Climate” discusses how our networked, high-tech society not only accelerates climate change, but actually destroys analog sources of knowledge (seed banks, archaeological remains stored in permafrost) in the process. “Complexity” argues that computational technology in high finance distorts economic information and accelerates inequality. “Conspiracy” shows how the algorithmic sorting of the internet channels ordinary people’s justified feelings of powerlessness and suspicion into siloed fringe groups, and “Concurrency” zeroes in on YouTube, which, in its drive to maximize viewers’ screen time (and Google’s bottom line), abets the computer-generated production and autoplay of ultraviolent, hyper-disturbing children’s videos. (Bridle posted a version of that chapter on Medium last year, tracing how a parent who puts their toddler in front of an innocuous “Peppa Pig” video may return to find the child watching Peppa being tortured.)

At the core of many of these problems is what Bridle calls computational thinking. Computational thinking assumes that perfect information about the past can and should be collected and synthesized to inform decisions about the future. In a chapter called “Complicity,” Bridle argues that this mindset informs government mass surveillance as well: Government intelligence agencies’ well-known policy to “collect it all” has no demonstrable track record of improving public safety or reducing violence. (This fact led even a U.S. presidential commission to declare mass surveillance “not essential to preventing attacks” in 2013.) The problem, Bridle suggests, is that the practice is “essentially retroactive and retributive.” It assumes that simple exposure is an end in itself, that problems will reveal, and even solve, themselves when thrown under the proverbial light.

“We have become convinced that throwing light upon the subject is the same thing as thinking it, and thus having agency over it,” Bridle warns.

This conceit is not limited to shadowy governments. Journalists, too, are guilty of it. Bridle’s primary example of this is the 2013 revelations of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden (revelations that catalyzed the founding of this very website). Despite the initial outcry over the exposure of the precise mechanics of mass surveillance by the U.S. and its allies, reforms were negligible at best, and public attention quickly shifted elsewhere. The problem, Bridle argues, is the expectation that exposure in itself will lead to understanding and action. This is how journalism itself adopts the same obsessive, paranoid logic as computation and surveillance: It forgoes a true understanding of the present and future as it obsessively crafts a perfect image of the past. “We have become convinced that throwing light upon the subject is the same thing as thinking it, and thus having agency over it,” Bridle warns.

What “New Dark Age” proposes in order to tackle this problem is not so much a course of action but a new way of thinking. “What is needed is not new technology,” Bridle writes in the opening pages, “but new metaphors.” In contrast to computational thinking, which falsely thinks it can behold and comprehend every fact about the world, Bridle proposes “cloudy thinking,” a practice that acknowledges what is unknowable and seeks “new ways of seeing by another light.” Bridle actually intends the “New Dark Age” of the book’s title to be read as an opportunity, not a lament. To embrace this opportunity, he argues, we have to give up pretensions about perfect knowledge, and instead embrace responsible skepticism informed by our recognition that the network we live and work in is actively obscuring our understanding of the real world and reinforcing injustice in the process.

“Nothing here is an argument against technology,” Bridle insists, “to do so would be to argue against ourselves.” Technology is both a tool for remaking the world and a metaphor for understanding it. Fair enough: Bridle is probably right that we need to learn to expect different things from our relationship with technology. We cannot expect it to provide perfect information or social consensus. We should be ready to act on provisional information from trusted sources, rather than waiting for technology to synthesize and verify every last fact. If we wait, it will be too late.

But to take this advice without confronting head-on just what the internet has become seems foolish. While Bridle is right to suggest the inextricability of our lives with the contemporary internet, he at times seems to succumb both to a kind of fatalism and a naive optimism. The fatalism is his assumption that we are stuck with the internet we have. The optimism is the suggestion that by simply thinking about the internet differently, we can subvert its socially destructive ends.

Internet infrastructure is capital, a series of investments by governments and corporations. And they expect a return on it.

The problem is that the internet as we know it is not only, or even primarily, a virtual thing: It is made possible by a worldwide network of cables that span oceans, brutalist skyscrapers that punctuate skylines, and massive data centers that require as much energy as cities. This infrastructure is capital, a series of investments by governments and corporations. And they expect a return on it.

Bridle, along with the writer Ingrid Burrington, has done us a great service by emphasizing the tangible nature of the infrastructure that constitutes the internet. “New Dark Age” also points out the enormous material interests that motivate continued investment in it. “Empire has mostly rescinded territory, only to continue its operation at the level of infrastructure, maintaining its power in the form of the network,” Bridle writes. Unfortunately, he does not follow this insight to its logical conclusion. Power cannot be seized by mere thought — it can only be seized by action. If the infrastructure of the internet is operated by the vestiges of an empire invested in the exploitation of the greater part of humanity, how we can we expect the internet to work for that same humanity?

Calls to socialize the internet, or demand public control of data, may seem unrealistic, but at least they confront this question. It’s disappointing that a book that is so clear-eyed about the seemingly apocalyptic scenarios facing human civilization doesn’t tackle it head-on. Maybe it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet. But future elaborations on Bridle’s work will have to reckon with this question he refuses to address: whether the only way to save the internet and the planet is to actually seize its infrastructure — every last data center and switchboard — from the powers that be so that it can finally serve egalitarian, socially responsible purposes. Or, failing that, whether it would be in the best interest of humanity to destroy the internet entirely.

The post Is It Easier to Imagine the End of the World Than the End of the Internet? appeared first on The Intercept.

Porfirio Mejia, the Dominican-born New Yorker who has owned this grocery for six years, seems to know everyone. He pats a few kids on the head and nods when a woman tells him she’ll pay him tomorrow. He pauses to inspect the peppers and tomatoes, remarking that a fresh produce delivery is due the next day. He works with the anti-hunger advocacy organization City Harvest to promote fruit and vegetable purchases, and he says that more than half of his customers buy their groceries with SNAP, the government assistance program formerly known as food stamps.

Well, they used to. The SNAP transactions at P&L tripped the wires of an algorithm that the U.S. Department of Agriculture uses to screen for fraud. Mejia’s decision to issue IOU’s to his regular customers — a policy that allowed him to deliver food to elderly neighbors and settle up after they received their benefits — triggered a suspicious activity flag in the system. By allowing customers to rack up a few weeks’ worth of grocery bills before paying with their benefit cards, Mejia violated the agency’s rules, which prohibit retailers from establishing informal credit systems with their customers.

About a year ago, a USDA letter informed Mejia that he was suspected of defrauding the government, so he rushed to enlist more than 30 of his neighbors to write letters explaining that his credit system did not constitute fraud — trading cash for food stamps. When I visited P&L in May, a stack of handwritten letters still sat on Mejia’s desk, with receipts attached.

Left/Top: Handwritten letters that Porfirio Mejia collected from customers to prove he did not commit SNAP fraud. Right/Bottom: Vegetables in Mejia's store. Photos: Derek Saffe

His efforts weren’t enough. The agency wanted itemized receipts for the purchases that had been flagged, but Mejia’s cash registers at the time printed only total sales figures; he couldn’t provide an accounting of the individual products that his clients had bought on credit. He was permanently banned from accepting food stamps. When he lost his SNAP customers, 35 to 40 percent of his income went with them. When we spoke in May, he said he’s had to cut down on employees’ hours, and started working 14- and 15-hour days. He’s thought about selling the store.

Mejia is hardly alone. Last year, the USDA disqualified more than 1,600 retailers across the country from receiving SNAP payments. Over 90 percent of those businesses are convenience stores or small groceries. And while some of them almost certainly engaged in the cash-for-food-stamps fraud that the system is designed to detect, many of them, like P&L, were probably unjustly caught in the crosshairs.

It’s impossible to pin down exactly how many retailers were banned from accepting SNAP dollars due to fraud charges that the government can’t actually prove. But court testimony by a USDA official indicates that, just last year, hundreds of retailers were permanently disqualified from the program based primarily on an algorithmic assessment of their transaction patterns — the same circumstantial evidence that ensnared Mejia. “It’s a jerry-rigged system against small retailers unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” said Stewart Fried, an attorney who has represented store owners flagged by the algorithm.

“It’s a jerry-rigged system against small retailers unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

The USDA does not bother to justify or even explain the precise sales figures or thresholds that cause retailers to be flagged for investigation. In fact, officials appear not to know how they were developed in the first place. Douglas Edward Wilson, a USDA program analyst who has worked with the ALERT system for more than a decade, testified in a 2017 deposition that he had no idea who originally set the parameters for flagging fraudulent transactions.

Mejia seems to have been disqualified from the SNAP program based almost entirely on the atypical transaction patterns identified by the algorithm. He said he was never asked to explain these patterns before he was charged with fraud, nor did the agency present him with any evidence that he had traded cash for food stamps. Once accused, he was expected to prove his own innocence and the odds were stacked against him.

His situation is not uncommon: Retailers are regularly issued letters alleging “unusual, irregular, and inexplicable SNAP activity” based on their transaction history. According to a deposition given by Gilda Torres, a USDA section chief who oversees disqualifications, algorithm-flagged stores referred to her office for investigation are issued charge letters more than 95 percent of the time. And once they’re charged, their chances of reversing the decision are close to zero.

After the charge letter is received, retailers have 10 days to submit evidence to prove their innocence, a process that rarely results in decision reversals. Torres oversees SNAP disqualifications in New England, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. In her district, 100 percent of cases that landed on her desk resulted in permanent disqualification in 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Businesses that do not successfully challenge the charge letter then have the option to seek administrative review of agency decisions, but that process is just as unforgiving. Of the 1,283 administrative reviews requested nationwide in 2017, only 20 disqualifications were reversed.

It’s a justice system that puts the burden of proof on the accused — and one in which most cases are decided long before they reach a courtroom. In the blink of an eye, the owners of small, neighborhood grocery stores can lose half their income.

When the Trump administration announced its half-baked proposal to replace some SNAP payments with pre-packaged “Harvest Boxes” in February, it justified the change in policy by claiming that it would help reduce food stamp fraud. But fraud plays a much larger role in the popular imagination than it does in the program itself. The USDA estimated that fraud accounted for 1.5 percent of the roughly $70 billion in benefits the program administered, or about $1 billion, in 2014. By contrast, that same year the government misallocated 2.27 percent of total benefits simply by overpaying beneficiaries, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Regardless, for each of the last three years, the agency appropriated more than $17 million to fight retailer fraud in the more than quarter million retail establishments that accept food stamps. (The USDA administers SNAP at the federal level.)

Before the agency fully transitioned to debit-style Electronic Benefit Transfer cards about 20 years ago, food stamp fraud was policed primarily using undercover agents. These agents watch for less serious program violations — like the sale of non-food items — and fraud, the exchange of cash for food stamps. A 2018 USDA request for information from potential government contractors provides a glimpse into how these investigations operate: Agents try to pass as a typical customer, then attempt to use EBT cards to purchase SNAP-ineligible items like sponges or cigarettes.

While the agency still uses these undercover agents — in 2017, it conducted 5,557 such investigations — they rarely find evidence of fraud. Last year, less than 6 percent of retail investigations found retailers engaging in actual fraud. (Less than half identified any program violations at all, even minor ones.)

The introduction of EBT cards provided a new way for the USDA to detect potentially fraudulent behavior: It could digitally monitor all transactions in real time and screen for patterns suggesting irregularities. The agency commissioned the development of an algorithm, dubbed the ALERT system, that is used in many SNAP fraud cases today.

The ALERT system analyzes millions of SNAP transactions and assigns ratings to businesses based on the number of unusual transactions they process. Unusual transactions can include sales volumes that are much higher than those at neighboring stores, multiple withdrawals from the same card over a short period of time, multiple purchases that end in the same number of cents, or very frequent or large purchases.

It was the last of these that ensnared Mejia. His practice of letting customers purchase food on credit — which resulted in one-time payments of hundreds of dollars when they cleared their accounts — showed up in the system as an atypical pattern and initiated his disqualification from the program.

The USDA argues that the ALERT system is one tool among many in a thorough disqualification process. “When [the USDA] suspects a store may be committing SNAP violations, staff will carefully review the store information including SNAP redemptions, any history of complaints, the owner’s history in the program, and store visit records which include photos and details of the store and inventory,” a USDA spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “If, after review of all the information gathered, [agency] staff believe further investigation is warranted, they (not the ALERT system) will initiate a compliance review — which may include further investigative analysis or an undercover investigation — and if warranted, charge the store with violations.”

Torres’s 2017 deposition tells a different story. The USDA section chief testified that the “investigative analysis” referenced in the agency’s emailed statement is based primarily on ALERT data. And there’s little leeway if a grocer is deemed to have violated the rules: According to decisions posted to the agency’s own website, retailers can be disqualified with no prior violations and decades of successful participation in the program.

Raul Barrios, a senior healthy retail specialist at the anti-hunger advocacy group City Harvest, spends most of his time visiting small New York City groceries to encourage proprietors to stock fruits and vegetables. He said he regularly encounters retailers who have been permanently disqualified from SNAP and appear to have inadvertently tripped the ALERT system’s wires through normal business activities that stop short of fraud. He cited stores like Mejia’s, which allowed customers to buy food on credit, and said that the multiple withdrawals flag could be triggered by neighbors who drop in for a gallon of milk in the morning and a bottle of water later in the day.

“In family-owned businesses that are pillars of the community, people go numerous times,” he said, adding that convenience store owners’ tendency to round prices to the nearest 50 cents likely triggers the same-cents flag. “A lot of them are not aware of the laws, of the do’s and the don’t’s.”

Barrios said he thinks up to half of retailers disqualified based on algorithmic evidence did not actually commit fraud. After all, credit systems like Mejia’s look the same on paper as the kind of cash-for-benefits scenario the government wants to stamp out.

Once a retailer receives a charge letter, they have 10 days to appeal the ruling by submitting proof that their transactions are all legitimate. (According to a USDA spokesperson, retailers can request extensions.) Last year, only 4 percent of retailers nationwide succeeded in reversing the decision during this stage.

Then, retailers have another opportunity to appeal during a process called “administrative review.” Reversal rates at this stage are even lower. For people like Mejia, who had no way of knowing that he needed to be saving itemized receipts, it’s an uphill battle. According to documents posted to the USDA’s website, retailers send a wide variety of paperwork to prove their innocence: medical records that show transactions flagged as fraudulent happened while owners were taking care of a sick family member, proof that employees had been trained in SNAP policy, credit logs, and in some cases hundreds of pages of receipts and letters from customers. Torres, the USDA section chief, testified that her region did not overturn any of its decisions in the last three years based on retailer-provided evidence during the administrative review period.

“[Retailers] lose almost 100 percent of the time because they don’t know what they’re doing, don’t know what [the USDA] is looking for,” said Fried, the lawyer.

According to Mejia, no one from the USDA ever called him to explain the appeals process. He does remember someone from the agency coming to his store before he received his charge letter, but that person only took pictures and didn’t initiate a conversation.

In Torres’s 2017 testimony for a separate SNAP case in Maryland, she said stores are initially inspected by agency contractors — sometimes months before a charge is issued — to measure square footage and look at inventory. These visits generate a sort of in-store snapshot for USDA staff members to cross-reference with ALERT system findings, and contractors aren’t tasked with finding hard evidence of fraudulent behavior. Torres said agency staff don’t typically visit retailers at any point in the disqualification process.

Mejia thought about retaining a lawyer but decided it would be too expensive. Had he sought legal advice, he might have discovered that there is one avenue for redress beyond the initial appeal and administrative review: judicial review of the decision, which means a trip to federal court. “At that point, the playing field gets leveled remarkably,” Fried said, adding that this process gives retailers access to the USDA’s full records and allows their lawyers to take depositions.

But legal representation can be expensive, and Barrios said small retailers are often skeptical that lawyers are worth the cost. The USDA doesn’t provide data on how many cases go to judicial review, but according to Fried, the number is almost certainly very small.

In other words, once retailers are accused, their chances of successfully proving their innocence are vanishingly slim. “That’s a big problem, when 100 percent of the retailers in all of New England, Jersey, Maryland, and D.C. are convicted based on a case that’s largely circumstantial,” Fried said, referring to Torres’s decision record since 2015. “The only hard evidence is a snapshot 30-minute visit [a USDA] contractor does, going out to the property one time to look around it.”

For now, Mejia’s moving on. He says he knows he broke the rules by allowing customers to buy on credit, and he accepts the agency’s decision to permanently disqualify him from SNAP. Still, he doesn’t think accepting credit is the same thing as trading cash for food stamps. And he thinks others have found themselves in the same boat, denied badly needed revenue simply for providing a service they see as neighborly. “It’s a system small business owners don’t understand,” he says in Spanish.

Top photo: Porfirio Mejia, the owner of a New York City bodega recently banned from accepting SNAP, poses for a photo in May 2018.

The post How an Algorithm Kicks Small Businesses Out of the Food Stamps Program on Dubious Fraud Charges appeared first on The Intercept.

A federal broadband program, designed after 9/11 to improve first responder communication during emergencies, will enhance this sort of capability and integrate it into an internet “super highway” built specifically for police and public safety. The program, called FirstNet, is already expanding the surveillance options available to law enforcement agencies across the country.

According to publicly available documents, as well as interviews with program participants, stakeholders, and government researchers, FirstNet will help agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection communicate with local police, deliver more information to officers’ hands, accelerate the nascent law enforcement app industry, and provide public safety agencies with new privileges and powers over AT&T’s commercial broadband network.

The program will also hasten these agencies’ migration from public radio frequencies to encrypted broadband networks, potentially eliminating one resource that local newsrooms and citizens have historically relied upon to monitor police and first responders.

FirstNet is a public-private partnership that creates a dedicated lane for public safety agencies within AT&T’s existing broadband network. As of January, all U.S. states had opted in to FirstNet, meaning that they agreed not to build their own competing broadband lanes for law enforcement and public safety. Then, in March, AT&T announced that FirstNet’s core — the infrastructure that isolates police traffic from the commercial network — had become operational at last.

“It’s like having a super highway that only public safety can use,” the company wrote in a press release.

Why FirstNet?

Part of FirstNet’s mission is to create a virtual space that allows any federal, state or local law enforcement or public safety agency to communicate seamlessly with any other. Therefore, convincing as many agencies as possible to sign up for the program is key to its success.

FirstNet recently pitched U.S. Customs and Border Protection to convince the agency to subscribe to the network. In a white paper, FirstNet claims its services will provide CBP access to “photographs, real-time audio/video feeds, and databases from other state, local, or Federal agencies … to aid in the identification and apprehension of terrorists, undocumented aliens, and smugglers.” These capabilities would be offered “in times of crisis or simply day-to-day operations.”

In the pitch, FirstNet also promises to help agents “connect to critical databases to identify whether detained persons have been previously apprehended for violating immigration law by quickly and efficiently collecting biographic (e.g., name, date of birth, place of birth) and biometric information (e.g., 10-print fingerprints, photo image), which are submitted remotely to said databases.” The document also promotes FirstNet’s support of other data-heavy technologies, such as live video streaming from drones.

AT&T and FirstNet did not respond to questions about whether CBP or any other federal agency has subscribed to the program. (A recent press release indicates that some federal agencies are currently using the system, but it does not name them.) CBP did not respond to requests for comment.

Local law enforcement officials are well-aware of the new capabilities that FirstNet is offering their departments. Domingo Herraiz, programs director at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, is excited about the heightened access to federal data FirstNet promises. Herraiz told The Intercept that FirstNet will place information from fusion centers, which enable criminal intelligence-sharing between government agencies, at the fingertips of local officers. “You could have gang databases,” he said. “It’s not there [on officers’ phones] today, but it will be.”

A “Private Tunnel” for Law Enforcement and First Responders

The concept behind FirstNet — a broadband network dedicated to public safety — was inspired by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the so-called 9/11 Commission). Its 2004 report determined that streamlined communication between different agencies and jurisdictions could have saved lives in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The report blamed the use of separate radio frequencies by police and firefighters for the deaths of firefighters who didn’t get the message to evacuate before the north tower collapsed.

In March 2017, the U.S. Department of Commerce signed a contract with AT&T, creating a dedicated lane for FirstNet within AT&T’s existing broadband network. In the deal, the federal government gave AT&T rights to 20 MHz of lucrative broadband spectrum, as well as $6.5 billion for FirstNet’s initial rollout. In return, the government got AT&T’s commitment to spending $40 billion over the next 25 years on network buildout and maintenance. Since 2013, the Department of Commerce has also awarded $116.5 million in funding to state Homeland Security agencies, offices of information technology, public safety agencies, and statewide communication boards to help implement and promote the network.

Scott Edson is the executive director of the Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System, a fully independent public safety network built with some of the early funding for FirstNet. According to Edson, when local agencies subscribe to FirstNet, they will get “a special connection that looks just like a commercial carrier but [connects to] what’s called a dedicated core.” FirstNet is “a private tunnel within their AT&T network,” he explained.

FirstNet provides “priority” and “pre-emption” privileges that have long been desired by public safety agencies. “Priority” means faster access to broadband-based services. “You may have license plate readers that are scanning cars that are nearby and querying databases automatically,” explained Edson, who is also former chief of special operations at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “That’s all data that’s going to be prioritized to help us do our job.”

But priority is not always enough to guarantee a fast connection during an emergency or a large gathering like a parade, sporting event, or protest, when networks can get jammed. That’s where “pre-emption” comes in. Pre-emption allows public safety agencies or police to boot the general public off the network.

“At a time of crisis, yeah, you’re trying to call your mom and say you’re safe,” Herraiz from IACP told The Intercept. “But it’s more important that that network shut down every citizen, so it can be used solely for public safety purposes, so lives can be saved.”

Service Providers Compete for Public Safety Customers

Before FirstNet, the commercial broadband industry would not offer these public safety privileges on its networks. “They told us we would never have priority and pre-emption,” Edson told The Intercept. But if providers like Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile want to compete with FirstNet, they, too, will have to begin offering priority and pre-emption. (In January, Verizon announced that it would begin to phase in these features.)

Though all U.S. states have agreements with FirstNet, this doesn’t commit state or local agencies to subscribing to the service. Most agencies currently subscribe to Verizon, which announced its own dedicated “core” for public safety users in March. (In February, the company aired a Super Bowl ad suggesting that it intends to retain its market share with first responders.)

But subscriptions for FirstNet are picking up quickly. In June, AT&T announced that more than 1,000 agencies had signed up. The company also announced that over 5,300 of its retail stores would offer personal FirstNet subscriptions to “verified” police and first responders whose agencies don’t provide wireless plans. (Volunteer first responders are eligible for this offer as well.)

With Verizon mimicking FirstNet’s priority and pre-emption offerings, FirstNet is aggressively pursuing new frontiers in public safety technology and smartphone apps, which could make its service more competitive.

Indeed, FirstNet has its own “app store.” In a slide presentation it prepared for the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials conference in August 2017, FirstNet touted its intention to “enable development of a growing portfolio of public safety apps.” These applications will incorporate facial recognition, real-time video, and other existing technologies, according to the presentation.

Millions of dollars of government research funding are underwriting this development. For example, the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology is funding research into real-time video analytics (including the automated recognition of faces, objects, and text), a “hyper-reality helmet for mapping and visualizing public safety data” in the field, and livestreaming and analytics for body-worn cameras, among other technologies.

According to Dereck Orr, chief of the Public Safety Communications Research Division at NIST, most of the research into these technologies will eventually be made public. However, he added, “we certainly bring [FirstNet] in to discuss creation and priorities of new processes, because we want to make sure that anything we do is going to be something that is impactful and useful to FirstNet.”

A Loss of Public Oversight?

With this frenzy of technological development, a longtime transparency tool is suddenly under threat. For decades, local newsrooms and citizen watchdogs have relied on police scanners to monitor first responders and track natural disasters, protests, and emergencies. The migration to data-based communications cuts down on what is communicated over these public frequencies. As FirstNet and its competitors transition voice communications to their encrypted broadband networks in the coming years, even more will be kept from public oversight.

That concerns Andrew Seaman, ethics committee chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. Seaman told The Intercept that he hopes measures will be taken to guarantee journalists and newsrooms access to the encrypted FirstNet network.

“There are very practical reasons why there should be a relationship between first responder emergency systems and the press,” he said. “If you want people to know what’s going on — that they should avoid a certain area or if they need to get out of an area quickly — you’re going to need to equip journalists with the ability to monitor these channels.”

FirstNet did not comment on whether it was open to offering local newsrooms some access. Edson of LA-RICS said decisions about transparency and access for newsrooms will likely have to take place at the local government level.

FirstNet is already the subject of a transparency lawsuit by two Vermont men who claim that the U.S. government is legally required to perform a Privacy Impact Assessment on the program, since the FirstNet network will presumably be used to transmit personal information about American citizens. The government has argued that this requirement does not apply since the network itself is owned by AT&T, rather than the government.

The program’s status as a public-private partnership has created other transparency roadblocks as well: The federal government’s contract with AT&T has not been made public.

Worth the Cost?

Some have criticized FirstNet as a waste of public funds because after years of talk, it has produced few deliverables. However, its ultimate impact on U.S. broadband is likely to be extensive, if incremental. For example, FirstNet’s prioritized section of the broadband spectrum is now being extended to some private entities, like electric utilities, that help first responders or provide essential services during emergencies.

FirstNet’s most lasting achievement may be the infrastructure it provides for state-of-the-art surveillance technologies to be deployed by law enforcement at every level. One of FirstNet’s early adopters, the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, has celebrated how FirstNet allows it to livestream surveillance footage to its central command. Only time will tell if the program can enable emerging technologies like real-time facial recognition to become part of the day-to-day operations of U.S. police.

Despite the surveillance enhancements that FirstNet offers local police departments, some are skeptical that local governments (and voters) can be convinced that subscribing to the program is a worthy investment.

“The public believes law enforcement already has all this at their fingertips,” Herraiz told The Intercept. “They think when you run a license tag or your driver’s license, the cops know everything about you. That’s not true.”

Well, not yet.

Top photo: A Chicago police officer speaks on his radio at the scene of a shooting on July 28, 2017, in the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago.

The post A New Broadband Network Is Pitching Surveillance Enhancements to Cops Across the Country appeared first on The Intercept.

While the CDC report notes that guns are the most common method for these suicides — accounting for about half of all cases — it fails to underscore the extent to which these alarming rates may be attributable to the country’s utter saturation with civilian firearms.

“It’s not just about firearms,” Deborah Stone, the lead author of the study, told NPR. “It’s also about other methods of suicide, such as hanging, suffocation, poisoning, and the like.”

Research consistently points to a strong association between firearm access and suicide deaths.

While it may be true that suicide rates are increasing across the board, research consistently points to a strong association between firearm access and suicide deaths, independent of other factors. In a country that has as many privately owned guns as it does people, this presents a unique public health problem.

“Cut it however you want,” the Harvard School of Public Health’s Deborah Azrael put it in 2013. “In places where exposure to guns is higher, more people die of suicide.”

The reason for this is relatively simple: Unlike other common methods of suicide, firing a gun is an immediate, irreversible, and reliably lethal act. And because suicide is, more often than not, impulsive — and the time between ideation and action is short — firearm access is uniquely deadly if someone thinks to kill themselves at all. Gun suicide attempts end in death about 85 percent of the time, compared to less than 5 percent for intentional drug overdoses.

Because of this, the presence of guns in over a third of U.S. households greatly enhances the aggregate risk of suicide deaths. Variation in suicide rates within the U.S. supports this conclusion. A 2008 study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared states with the lowest household gun ownership rates (15 percent) to those with the highest (47 percent). While non-firearm suicides were basically equivalent in both groups, firearm suicides were about four times more prevalent in the latter. The more firearm-saturated population experienced about twice as many suicide deaths overall.

To be fair, the CDC does issue a mild recommendation regarding guns in its press release announcing the study: “Reduce access to lethal means – such as medications and firearms – among people at risk of suicide.”

This recommendation, however, is only really useful if suicide is a generally predictable phenomenon. Unfortunately, it’s not. The new CDC study itself found that 54 percent of suicide victims in 2015 had no known mental health conditions. And suicidal ideation can arise from a plethora of quotidian experiences that aren’t commonly documented or recognized as actionable mental health issues: financial distress, relationship crises, substance abuse, and so on. In these situations, individualized interventions and safer storage methods simply cannot substitute for not having a gun nearby in the first place.

Because it relies on Congress for funding, the CDC may have good reason not to emphasize the unique role of firearms in U.S. suicide rates. In 1993, the agency supported a study that found that people with guns at home faced a risk of suicide five times greater than those without. Three years later, Congress passed what’s known as the Dickey Amendment, which effectively prevented the CDC from funding targeted research into gun violence.

Top photo: Handguns are seen on display at the K&W Gunworks store on Jan. 5, 2016 in Delray Beach, Fla.

The post New CDC Report Downplays Role of Guns in Rising U.S. Suicide Rates appeared first on The Intercept.

“Camichael [sic] shouldn’t be surprised,” tweeted Lorella Praeli, the director of immigration policy and campaigns at American Civil Liberties Union. “He chose to facilitate Trump’s deportation force. Sheriffs around the country, take notice.”

Carmichael’s department had participated in a controversial program launched by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to form partnerships with state and local law enforcement. The 287(g) program, which delegates immigration roles to state and local authorities, has become a lightning rod political issue since Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.

According to ICE, the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office’s participation in the program led to nearly 300 deportations in fiscal year 2017 alone. As The Intercept reported in April, a broad coalition of community groups pitched last night’s Democratic primary as a referendum on that policy.

“287(g) is going to be history in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. It’s going to be an event,” said Garry McFadden, a former Charlotte-Mecklenburg police detective, who beat Carmichael in the primary.

Carmichael defended the program throughout his campaign. Both of Carmichael’s primary opponents, on the other hand, ran against the policy. McFadden captured the Democratic nomination with 52 percent of the vote. Carmichael pulled a distant third place, with just over 20 percent of ballots. Because no Republican is running for the office, McFadden is now essentially guaranteed to be Mecklenburg County’s next sheriff.

287(g) refers to a section added to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1996, under which local departments are permitted to interrogate those in their custody about their immigration status and to hold undocumented individuals for transfer to ICE custody. ICE describes the program as one of its “top partnership initiatives.”

Mecklenburg County joined the program in 2006. Since then, over 15,000 people have been processed for deportation after being arrested by the Sheriff’s Office — often for traffic violations like driving without a license. (North Carolina does not issue driver’s licenses to undocumented residents.)

The program is a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy. Days after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order calling for an expansion of the program. ICE currently has 287(g) agreements with 76 jurisdictions across the country. Forty-seven of those have been signed under the current administration.

Organized opposition to the program in Mecklenburg County is long-standing. In March, 45 community groups signed a letter that called on the Sheriff’s Office to terminate its 287(g) agreement with ICE. Under fire, Carmichael went on Fox News to defend the program. But his opponents remained resolute.

“We have a critical mass,” Cat Bao Le, executive director of the Southeast Asian Coalition in Charlotte, told The Intercept two weeks before the election.

Tuesday’s results proved her right.

Top photo: Mecklenburg County incumbent sheriff Irwin Carmichael.

The post A North Carolina Sheriff Doubled Down on Cooperation With ICE — So Voters Gave Him the Boot appeared first on The Intercept.

But this new revenue will effectively function as a double subsidy for the company: In Arizona, new data suggests that one in three of the company’s own employees depend on SNAP to put food on the table. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, the figure appears to be around one in 10. Overall, of five states that responded to a public records request for a list of their top employers of SNAP recipients, Amazon cracked the top 20 in four.

By 2021, Amazon is projected to handle 50 percent of all online sales in the United States. To accomplish this, it must add to the dozens of fulfillment centers that ensure the swift delivery of cheap televisions and shampoo bottles to nearly every corner of the nation. And to finance this expansion, the company will doubtless continue to leverage the promise of full-time jobs with benefits that it has used to win more than $1.2 billion in incentives from state and local governments so far.

Even as generous subsidies help Amazon turn a profit, thousands of its workers depend on the federal safety net.

However, though taxpayers have generously subsidized the build-out of Amazon’s warehouses, it’s not clear that the company has held up its end of the bargain. The jury is still out on its warehouses’ net effects on long term employment in the places they’re located. And independent analyses have shown that the company pays below-average wages for the warehouse jobs it brings to town.

The new data showing Amazon employees’ extensive reliance on SNAP demonstrates an additional public cost of the corporation’s rapid expansion. Even as generous subsidies help its warehouses turn a profit, its workers still must turn to the federal safety net to put food on the table. In Pennsylvania, for instance, an estimated $24.8 million in subsidies support 13 warehouses employing around 10,000 workers. At the same time, more than 1,000 of those workers don’t make enough money to buy groceries, according to public data provided by the state.

The American people are financing Amazon’s pursuit of an e-commerce monopoly every step of the way: first, with tax breaks, subsidies, and infrastructure improvements meant to lure fulfillment centers into town, and later with federal transfers to pay for warehouse workers’ food. And soon, when the company begins accepting SNAP dollars to purchase its goods, a third transfer of public wealth to private hands will become a part of the company’s business model.

In five out of these six states, Amazon cracked the top 20 list of companies with the most employees enrolled in the SNAP program. The numbers show that the company relies disproportionately on the program even accounting for its size: Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP. It held the fifth slot in Pennsylvania as well, though it’s only the 19th largest employer. In Kansas, where Amazon isn’t even among the top 50 largest employers, it still ranked 17th for the number of employees using SNAP at the beginning of this year. Similarly, the company ranked 53rd in overall employment numbers in Ohio last year but 19th when it came to employees using SNAP. In Washington, where Amazon’s headquarters employ many white-collar workers, its employees were still the 17th most reliant on SNAP over the past four years.

Eligibility for SNAP is tied to more than just raw income, and states have wide latitude to administer the program according to federal guidelines. Household size, immigration status, asset ownership, and cost-of-living can all come into play when eligibility is determined. Some of the SNAP users working for Amazon are likely part-time employees, which would explain their low earnings. But the company claims that on average, more than 90 percent of its fulfillment center workforce is made up of full-time, direct hires.

Amazon’s rapid growth has obscured the reality of its impact on the communities that pay for the privilege of hosting its warehouses: Though the company now employs 200,000 people in the United States, many of its workers are not making enough money to put food on the table.

When Amazon proposed a fulfillment center in Miami-Dade County last year, county officials anticipated the warehouse would bring 2,300 jobs at an average salary of $37,000. The company secured $1.5 million in tax rebates and a $5 million bond for infrastructure improvement largely based on these projections. But by the time negotiations concluded, the number of jobs necessary to qualify for the bond had been cut to 1,000, and salary expectations fell to $27,500, or $24,018 for jobs that included benefits. (The company had secured an exemption to the county’s usual requirement that projects receiving taxpayer-funded bonds provide “responsible wages.”)

“This started out with language like ‘game-changing,’” Miami-Dade Inspector General Mary Cagle told the Puget Sound Business Journal for a 2017 investigation of the company. “You have to ask yourself the question, ‘Is this game-changing?’”

The Business Journal spoke to officials in dozens of cities across the country who told similar stories about the company’s playbook: Amazon tends to “enter quietly, move fast, [and] pit sites against each other” to score generous subsidies.

Amazon initially built its business empire by exploiting a loophole that exempted it from collecting sales tax. As states began closing this loophole, Amazon switched tactics and focused instead on winning subsidies at the local level. When the New York Times investigated corporate incentives in 2012, Amazon had received $348 million from states and localities. By October 2017, when Business Journal released its findings, that number had more than tripled to $1.2 billion.

When companies receive government incentives, they might reasonably be expected to guarantee stable, well-paying jobs in return. But these incentives usually don’t come with such requirements. In a December 2011 report, the accountability think tank Good Jobs First analyzed state economic development programs. Its researchers found that fewer than half of the subsidy programs they looked at provided any type of wage standard for the jobs created.

To get its fulfillment centers built, Amazon capitalizes on a sense of urgency and competition to maximize the subsidies it receives. In doing so, it’s able to chip away at officials’ expectations for jobs and wages. Yet once the papers are signed and the warehouses are built, Amazon doesn’t appear to boost overall local employment. And the jobs it’s offering don’t look as good in reality as they do on paper.

Amazon disputes this, asserting that the pick-and-pack jobs it’s offering are more similar to retail work than warehouse work, in part because its fulfillment centers are temperature-controlled. A company spokesperson also emphasized that Amazon’s fulfillment center jobs are unskilled, whereas some traditional warehouse jobs require manufacturing skills.

Amazon’s fulfillment center wages are, generally speaking, lower than the average wages for warehouse employees elsewhere. “The average warehouse worker at Walmart makes just under $40,000 annually, while at Amazon would take home about $24,300 a year,” CNN reported in 2013. “That’s less than $1,000 above the official federal poverty line for a family of four.”

A November 2016 study by the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a community development advocacy group, analyzed more than 1,300 wage postings on Glassdoor and found that positions at Amazon’s fulfillment centers paid about 9 percent less than the industry average. And when the researchers homed in on 11 major metro areas to account for differences in cost of living, they found that Amazon’s wage dip was even more pronounced: The company was paying 15 percent less than comparable positions in each area. A January 2018 study by The Economist using different methods found similar results.

An informal search of current job advertisements for full-time employees at Amazon fulfillment centers in states that responded to our inquiry corroborated this research. Starting pay ranged from $12 to $15 an hour. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage for non-managerial employees who work in warehousing and storage was $17.53 as of January 2018. Even after stripping out the more lucrative warehouse positions that require skilled labor — forklift operators, for instance — pay for the lowest earners within the category, the people classified as “laborers and material movers,” still averaged higher than Amazon’s starting pay with a mean of $15.12 an hour.

Amazon has argued that its total compensation packages are competitive with the higher hourly rates of other companies’ warehousing jobs because of the benefits it offers to full-time employees. A company representative said that employees receive regular performance bonuses that augment their hourly pay, but she refused to indicate how much these bonuses might impact take-home wages in an average month. In response to a request for general comment about Amazon employees’ usage of SNAP in Ohio, the company reiterated some of these points in an email, emphasizing the fact that it provides health insurance, parental leave, and a program that helps pre-pay tuition for continuing education.

Temp employees remain invisible even as Amazon’s reliance on the SNAP program comes into focus.

But there’s a whole other class of fulfillment center employee without those benefit packages: temp workers. They wear different colored badges than the Amazon employees, but according to the ILSR report, they work side by side.

“Amazon says ‘seasonal,’ and some people say ‘temp,’ but in a lot of cases we’re talking about people working for Amazon who are working full days over an extended period of time,” said Olivia LaVecchia, a researcher for ILSR. “The only difference is they are not employed directly by Amazon. So Amazon gets off the hook for having no responsibility for them — legal and otherwise.”

Even though we can’t pin down precise numbers, temp workers’ presence in fulfillment centers is an important consideration if we’re trying to quantify Amazon’s total impact on the safety net. According to an analysis by the U.S. Department of Commerce, temp workers classified as “laborers and freight, stock, and material movers” made an average of $11.05 an hour in 2014, while direct hires made a mean hourly wage of $13.07. That means it’s likely they rely on programs like SNAP at higher rates than Amazon’s direct hires. Temp agencies appeared among the top 50 SNAP employers in every state that responded to our inquiry.

One temp agency in particular, Integrity Staffing Solutions, has called itself “a primary supplier to Amazon.” (The ILSR report refers to Integrity Staffing Solutions as a “human resources arm” of Amazon.) Integrity Staffing Solutions appeared as the 37th largest employer of SNAP recipients in Arizona. We can’t tell how many (if any) of those workers clock in at Amazon fulfillment centers, but Integrity’s presence on the list is a reminder that temp employees remain invisible even as the broader picture of Amazon’s reliance on the SNAP program comes into focus.

It’s no surprise that low-wage work often forces people to rely on public assistance to make ends meet. For the most part, the SNAP employer lists we obtained showed predictable trends: Walmart and McDonald’s fell in the top two slots in every state except one, and fast food companies in general were overrepresented. It’s also not particularly newsworthy that companies that generate a profit from the SNAP program also employ many people who rely on it. Walmart sees roughly $13 billion in annual revenue from SNAP, even as it tops the lists of employers whose workers rely on the program.

But Amazon’s position is unique: It effectively paid no federal income tax in 2017 and has won more than $1.2 billion in incentives to build out its U.S. network. Walmart, on the other hand, typically pays pretty close to the full corporate tax rate, meaning it certainly contributes much more than Amazon to the federal safety net that supports its customers and workers.

Our survey of just six states shows that Amazon ranks in the top 20 employers of SNAP recipients in nearly all of them, and those figures don’t include temp workers who likely rely on the program at even higher rates. These numbers are set against a backdrop of unprecedented growth: Amazon nearly doubled its total workforce from 300,000 to 541,900 between the third quarters of 2016 and 2017.

Amazon’s momentum shows no signs of slowing. On a single day last summer, the company attempted to fill 50,000 warehouse openings with dozens of jobs fairs across the country.

“What’s not great about a company that keeps building?” one applicant in Illinois asked a reporter for the New York Times.

After a five-hour wait, he left without a job.

Top photo: Job applicants wait to enter an Amazon fulfillment center in Kent, Wash., during the company’s nationwide jobs fair in August 2017.

The post Amazon Gets Tax Breaks While Its Employees Rely on Food Stamps, New Data Shows appeared first on The Intercept.