At the height of the conflict, O’Rourke publicly mused about disbanding the police union, calling it “out of control” and lamenting his colleagues’ unwillingness to stand up to the powerful political force. A year later, he was calling for “better checks on collective bargaining in the public sector.”

The fight came at one of the bleakest moments of the Great Recession, and the city was stuck in contracts with the police and firefighters unions that provided for annual raises and benefits. The city manager was proposing a 5 percent property tax increase and other hikes in fees to pay for them, but the city council wanted the unions to defer some of the wage increases and forfeit some of the holidays. The Firemen and Policemen’s Pension Fund was in need of more money, which meant they were open to negotiations, but O’Rourke was frustrated at how dug in he said they were.

Police unions have increasingly found themselves in conflict with progressive Democrats in cities across the country, and are notorious for defending even the worst officers on the force against charges of assault or murder. Chris Evans, O’Rourke’s spokesperson, said that when he relayed The Intercept’s inquiry to O’Rourke, O’Rourke’s first memory of the fight was that police were demanding a provision that would give officers a 48-hour window after a police shooting before they would have to answer an investigator’s questions. That provision is indeed in the contract; O’Rourke’s remarks at the time, however, were focused on officer compensation and El Paso’s strapped budget.

O’Rourke, in public, took particular exception to some of the demands from the police union in the ongoing negotiations, including its continued insistence on maintaining the wage increases, which he said amounted to 8 percent each year. In an August 3, 2010, meeting, a seemingly exasperated O’Rourke went so far as to ask the city’s attorney if there was a way to eliminate the union altogether.

“In my opinion, the basic problem with this whole setup is you’ve got a very powerful police union that’s been able to extract an unsustainable increase in salaries year over year and an unsustainable series of additional benefits,” he said, following an exchange over the city manager’s proposal to create a second police academy. “What are the provisions or opportunities for the voters of El Paso to go back to some other form of representation for the police officers?”

The attorney said there was not, and following the meeting, O’Rourke called the police union “out of control” and questioned “the need and wisdom” of having it in the city at all. The police union, angry at demands from the city council that the police be furloughed, responded by running an ad against O’Rourke and the city council.

The battle with the unions is another window into the former congressperson’s enigmatic politics. O’Rourke was a member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition while in Congress, and cast a number of votes with Republicans on financial regulatory reform and other issues. Yet he also bucked his party from the left, casting just one of eight votes against military aid for Israel at the height of the Gaza war. As a city council member, he faced a recall threat over his support of LGBT rights. In 2018, he ran for Senate as an outspoken progressive, embracing “Medicare for All,” condemning police violence, and swearing off corporate political action committee money. He took a pledge not to accept fossil fuel cash for his campaign. Dozens of oil and gas executives, however, gave him the legal maximum, and he’s since been removed from the pledge.

As O’Rourke fought over salaries and benefits, he was also rankling the police force by sponsoring a resolution that called for a national dialogue on drug legalization. (The resolution passed the city council, but the local congressperson threatened the city’s federal funding if the mayor didn’t veto it. It was vetoed, which triggered O’Rourke to primary the incumbent.)

Evans told The Intercept that O’Rourke’s past remarks are not indicative of his views on unions generally but “were specific to the police union’s unacceptable behavior and the specific negotiation, not public sector employees as a whole.”

“He is a strong believer in the right for labor to organize and has been a reliable advocate for public sector unions and collective bargaining,” Evans wrote in an email, adding, “He campaigned everywhere in the state saying, ‘In this state that does not allow teachers to organize and strike, we will organize and fight for our teachers.’”

But in multiple interviews following the August 2010 meeting, when asked to clarify or expand on his remarks, O’Rourke expressed the belief that private- and public-sector collective bargaining were different and that the latter could be deleterious to the well-being of municipalities and taxpayers. In June 2011, for example, O’Rourke specifically included the firefighters’ union in his critique.

Q: You’ve made some controversial statements about the police and firefighters collective bargaining process and the position that has put the city in regarding continual salary increases and benefits. Your thoughts on that today and what the city might do?

A: I’m a big believer in labor’s right to collectively bargain in the private sector. The public sector is a completely different situation. From my experience these last six years on City Council, I do not think it is in the community’s best interests, certainly not in the taxpayers’ best interests, to have collective bargaining by the police and firefighters.

They are exceptional public servants; however, they are not so exceptional that they get to have these contracts and rights that no other city employee enjoy and which the taxpayer cannot continue to finance without the city going broke.

O’Rourke went on to praise then-Speaker Paul Ryan for having the “courage” to propose slashing Medicare funding and shifting costs onto beneficiaries and states — though he added that he disagreed with the substance of Ryan’s proposal.

“[W]hile I don’t necessarily agree with his take on Medicare, I think it’s impressive that he was willing to take that on, because no one else has had the guts to take that on,” he said. “That’s what is missing in political leadership in America today, and that is guts. I think the public is starving for it.”

Evans clarified this statement on Medicare, citing O’Rourke’s efforts to “improve” the program by allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices, as well as his vote against cuts. “In fact, he actually co-led efforts to introduce Medicare X and Medicaid public option legislation,” Evans wrote. “On top of that, he called for giving individuals the opportunity to buy into Medicare on the exchanges and advocated for Texas to expand Medicaid.”

A few months after that interview, in October, O’Rourke was again asked about the conflict and said he was a “huge believer in the right of labor to organize,” but added, “I’ll tell you though, that there is a difference when you have collective bargaining in the public sector.”

He described the tense negotiations and the lopsided deal he felt the city had struck. “I was deeply disappointed in especially the police union’s intransigence when we were in tough budget straits because we were in the depth of a national recession that was affecting El Paso. We didn’t want to lay anybody off, and the police union had negotiated a contract for themselves that the city council — minus my vote and minus Steve Ortega’s vote — had agreed to, had given them guaranteed raises, merit raises, and step increases and a very rich benefits program, while everyday El Pasoans … that pay taxes and pay their salaries were going broke and were going without jobs. I thought that was unfair,” he said.

Unless someone had the “courage to stand up,” the city would “run out of money and … have to start laying people off.”

O’Rourke said that the police and firefighters unions had too much power as a result of their role in funding elections. “You have a problem when people who are paying and donating to your campaign, and control a lot of the flow of money and influence in those campaigns, are then sitting across from you at the negotiating table,” he said. “I’m proud of my vote against it, but we took holy hell from the police union.” O’Rourke’s relationship with police unions went further south during the Senate campaign, with his viral defense of NFL players who take a knee protesting police violence, and another viral clip of him condemning police violence inside a church, which Ted Cruz shared.

In his October interview, O’Rourke hinted at his inquiry into whether the police union could be broken. “Now … the city doesn’t have the power, nor do I as an individual, to do away with collective bargaining,” he explained, “but I seriously question the city’s backbone in standing up and negotiate a good deal.”

O’Rourke emphasized the role unions had played in the U.S., but concluded that “there need to be better checks on collective bargaining in the public sector.”

“I don’t, by any stretch, want to do what Wisconsin’s done,” he added.

At the time, the tea party movement was reshaping the American political landscape by then, challenging the power of public-sector labor in states like Wisconsin, where then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker was trying to break the teachers union.

O’Rourke’s remarks did not hurt him with firefighters at the time, El Paso Association of Fire Fighters President Joe Tellez told The Intercept. From his recollection, O’Rourke’s beef was with the police union, and “they do business a little differently.” The firefighters, he explained, had deferred some of their wages as a show of solidarity with the struggling people of El Paso.

“O’Rourke, from our point of view, is a supporter,” Tellez noted. “We endorsed him as a city rep, we endorsed him as a congressman, we endorsed him not just at the local level but at the state level, in his run for Senate. And we had one-on-one conversations that, point blank, he supported our collective bargaining rights, and he always voted on our issues in an affirmative way while he was in Congress.”

Tellez wasn’t sure whether the meeting had happened before or after O’Rourke’s June 2011 remarks that included the firefighters.

El Paso Municipal Police Officers’ Association President Ron Martin had a different view. “Back in that time, he was not an ally of the labor unions at all,” he told The Intercept, taking issue with how O’Rourke had characterized the union’s demands. “I guess throughout time, he has worked with us, worked with fire, and worked with the border patrol unions. I wouldn’t say he’s not an advocate of them, but he’s not — you know, he doesn’t come out and attack the unions anymore, even though it does cost money. But you know, our goal as the union wasn’t really money; it was more retention of personnel and trying to be able to hire somebody. And if you don’t offer some type of benefits, they’re going to go federal or somewhere else.”

O’Rourke ended up winning his primary against incumbent Democrat Silvestre Reyes, a former border patrol guard, galvanizing voters by drawing a contrast with his opponent on issues like use of campaign funds and cannabis legalization. His election effort received outside help from Republican oilman Tim Dunn who ran a Super PAC dedicated to ousting incumbents; O’Rourke’s father-in-law, a real estate magnate, contributed to the Super PAC. Dunn currently chairs the board of directors for the free-market nonprofit Empower Texans and its project, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility. Empower Texans seeks to give localities control over public pensions and eliminate the use of public funds for the collection of union dues. Dunn spent heavily against O’Rourke in his race for Senate against Cruz.

Organized labor — public and private sector — provides the Democratic Party with some of its strongest support in terms of both funding and turning out voters. For better or worse, collecting union endorsements early on is a necessary part of any Democratic primary. O’Rourke has faced difficulty in that arena in the 2018 cycle. The Texas AFL-CIO delayed its endorsement of the rising star. The decision has been linked to the congressperson’s support for allowing President Barack Obama to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which the Texas AFL-CIO opposed, as well as his no-show at the group’s convention.

But the Texas State Teachers Association was among the first unions to endorse O’Rourke in his race against Cruz, in February 2018. On the questionnaire the group sent out, O’Rourke pledged his support for public education employees’ right to collectively bargain.

In defense of O’Rourke’s pro-union bonafides, Evans cited O’Rourke’s work on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, as well as the endorsements he secured during his Senate campaign from the Texas AFL-CIO, the Texas State Association of Fire Fighters, National Nurses United, and the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union in the country.

O’Rourke boasts a lifetime score of 94 percent from the AFL-CIO for his voting record in Congress, and a recent poll of New Hampshire voters by Change Research showed that his supporters, compared to those of the other potential 2020 Democrats, have the most favorable views of unions.

The post The Union Fight That Defined Beto O’Rourke’s City Council Days appeared first on The Intercept.

Bobby Constantino, a former senior program associate at the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice, whose work focused on providing data-driven technical assistance to states, was one of the researchers involved in developing the alternative predictive method. He showed The Intercept how the project used donation data and mapping to identify pockets of support for Boston’s Ayanna Pressley and other insurgent primary candidates; he also pointed to the Georgia governor’s race between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp, as well as the U.S. Senate race in Texas between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz as areas where traditional polls are missing a chunk of the electorate, and where potential upsets may occur.

“Democrats might be able to gain as many as 20 percentage points simply by running candidates of color who inspire voters in the country’s most historically marginalized communities,” Constantino said.

According to Constantino’s research, Abrams, the Democratic nominee in the Georgia race, could pick up heavy support from poor, black urban areas in Atlanta that aren’t being accounted for in polling. Based on donations to the Abrams campaign from those communities, especially in comparison to 2014 nominee Jason Carter, Constantino believes there’s an upsurge of support for Abrams that’s thus far been missing in polls that show the race in a dead heat.

“We suspect the Georgia gubernatorial race will be telling, absent any vote suppression,” said Constantino.

Constantino looked at three of the areas, by zip code, with the lowest adjusted gross income in the state and found that there is significant support for an Abrams run in those areas. In Atlanta’s 30314, which is 94 percent black, Abrams received 39 contributions to Carter’s one in 2014; in Atlanta’s 30354, which is 66 percent black and 17 percent Hispanic, Abrams received 22 donations to Carter’s two; and in Atlanta’s 30310, which is 90 percent black, Abrams received 106 donations, while Carter had none.

It was a similar situation in the primary: Polls showed Abrams leading by 12 percentage points, with roughly half of voters undecided in the final weeks leading up to the election, and she ended up beating her opponent, Stacey Evans, by 53 points. Of the three zip codes above, Evans only received one donation, from the 30310. The Abrams and Pressley results, Constantino told The Intercept, are why he believes that the results in the general election could outperform the polls by double digits.

“There appears to be a strong nexus between concentration and spread of in-district contributions and election outcomes,” Constantino told The Intercept.

Constantino and his fellow researcher, Kristin Johnson, have already used the method to show how tracking donations can be used to predict outcomes in Massachusetts. When The Intercept interviewed Pressley in July, her campaign said internal polling showed her to be within 4 points of incumbent Congressperson Mike Capuano — polling that was done before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her late June primary race in Queens, New York, and gave Pressley a shout out, increasing the Boston city councilor’s profile. A source inside the campaign, speaking on background, told The Intercept that the campaign’s polling methodology was not different from that of other polls, but that the campaign believed it had a better sense of the electorate and therefore targeted a mix of likely voters they felt confident in.

But traditional polling didn’t show the same results — to their chagrin. In August, local radio station WBUR showed Pressley to be 13 points behind the incumbent. A month later, Pressley beat Capuano by 17 points.

Constantino’s team used data from the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance to map out the contributions to both Pressley and Capuano. By importing the data into Google Maps by way of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, the group was able to place donations within the district map. Donation amounts were less important than demographics, said Johnson, and weren’t used in the model.

“I didn’t think the amount of money was significant; what was significant was that the household median incomes were low,” said Johnson. “They were opening their purse to donate to campaigns, so it wasn’t necessarily the amount that was important, but rather that it identified a household which sought out the ability to provide that support.”

The data bears that out, especially once transferred to the map. Capuano’s in-district cash was clustered around the north end of the district, which is more wealthy but less populated. Pressley, on the other hand, had strong support throughout and far outraised Capuano in the poorer southern end of the district that has a large minority population. Those data points reflected the turnout and the heart of Pressley’s victory.

Note: Campaign contributions from residents within the MA 7th Congressional District. Data from https://www.fec.gov/ Graphic: Kristin Johnson/Boston Political Education

Such a spread of donations in poorer areas might indicate that the polls are off and that voters in poorer neighborhoods are energized — people who pollsters presume will not have turn out in large numbers, meaning their views are discounted in polls. Large turnout in marginalized communities can prove the polls wrong; areas with a low voter turnout experiencing a mushrooming of donations where there’s traditionally no major campaign investment can be an indicator of an upset.

“Pockets of donations in communities traditionally overlooked by polling may mean that there will be upswell of support the polls don’t catch,” said Constantino.

Brian Schaffner, a professor of civic studies at Tufts University, said that the way Constantino and Johnson employed their data could be a useful tool to help predict election outcomes in primary races. In primaries, polling is at a disadvantage when it comes to predicting what will happen: Few people are voting, and the hard lines of political partisanship are not in play. Schaffner explained, in an interview with The Intercept, how the vote can swing within a short amount of time.

“The main thing that predicts your voting is what party you’re with,” said Schaffner. “But in a primary, everyone’s the same party, so a lot of that is washed out.”

But Chris Tausanovitch, a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, is more skeptical about the methodology. Without a lot of elections to draw from thus far, Tausanovitch said social scientists can’t draw any conclusions from the data alone.

“What we’re being told about why a given map indicates a candidate has a chance of winning is different in each case,” said Tausanovitch. “It’s not always clear.”

Tausanovitch suggested an exhaustive approach to using the data more appropriately, one that would develop a forecasting model that does not rely on what he referred to as “post hoc explanations” for election results. By getting donation numbers from every race and seeing where the money comes from, he says, one could potentially use the financial data to predict outcomes.

“You have to define the data the same way in every case, base it in a firm notion of why it matters, then use it in as many cases as possible and show how that’s predictive,” said Tausanovitch.

Even then, Tausanovitch isn’t sold on the idea that financial data is enough to hang any major prediction on. There are just too many questions remaining, though investigating the correlation between different ways of thinking about donations and election outcomes could be a good starting point for further research.

“It wouldn’t convince me that donations are causing outcomes like enthusiasm,” said Tausanovitch. “But it could be useful for thinking about what factors matter.”

Johnson was careful to emphasize that the methodology she and Constantino used in their project isn’t meant to replace polling. Rather, it’s a supplement to existing predictive methods. “It’s an overall way to analyze data,” said Johnson. “And there’s a benefit to include it in election predictions.”

The post Stacey Abrams Could Have a Hidden Voter Advantage in Overlooked Communities, According to Georgia Campaign Contribution Data appeared first on The Intercept.

The police approached with guns cocked, Carlos said. They shouted for him to put his hands in the air. As Carlos stepped out of his truck, he noticed five law enforcement vehicles surrounding him. The police started asking questions: Where are you going? Are you carrying any drugs or weapons? Why are you here?

Carlos recalled another time when he’d been pulled over by men with guns, three years earlier, in his home province of Michoacán, Mexico. That time, it was by members of a drug cartel. Carlos and his family had handed out flyers for the leftist Mexican Party of the Democratic Revolution, known by its Spanish-language acronym PRD, during the 2012 and 2014 elections. At the time, local cartels — most notably, Los Zetas and La Familia — frequently intimidated voters into supporting the party they favored. The armed men asked Carlos which party he was voting for. Carlos replied that he hadn’t decided yet. The men threatened to kill him unless he voted for the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI; ultimately, they let him go. Afterward, Carlos faced a fundamental question: change my political beliefs, or run? He fled with his family to the United States, where he was about to face another life-altering encounter with forces beyond his control.

Soon, according to Carlos, he would be drawn against his will into a deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which asked him to snitch on other undocumented immigrants or face deportation. When he refused to comply, he faced retaliation. This account is based on more than 300 pages of documents and interviews with Carlos, his relatives, and his attorney. ICE declined to comment on most aspects of Carlos’s case, though an agency official said an inquiry had determined that some of Carlos’s accusations were unfounded.

The interrogation on that early morning in 2017 lasted five minutes before the officers, who turned out to be ICE agents, announced that they were executing an order for Carlos’s arrest.

The agents brought Carlos, 26 years old at the time, to their office downtown. At first, the officers simply demanded that he sign papers that they told him would allow them to send him back to Mexico. He refused and asked for an attorney. But unlike U.S. citizens in criminal cases, undocumented immigrants aren’t automatically afforded a lawyer. An agent, through a translator, told Carlos that he had two options: Either turn in other undocumented immigrants or be deported himself.

The agent laid out the choices in stark detail. At a monthly check-in at the ICE office, Carlos would report names of other undocumented people. The agent told him to focus on “illegal aliens” with criminal histories and charges like drunken driving or domestic violence. He would need to produce one name per month for three months. If he refused, he would be sent back to Mexico.

In that moment, sitting in front of an ICE agent, Carlos pondered another existential question: Do I turn in other members of my community, or abandon my two young kids and wife, pregnant with a third child? Frightened, he agreed to cooperate.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, like nearly all post-9/11 federal law enforcement agencies, has evolved into a de facto intelligence-gathering organization, in addition to its immigration and customs work. ICE is split into two main sub-agencies: one that focuses on the migration of people and another that targets the migration of crime.

Homeland Security Investigations polices cross-border criminal activity, which mostly includes human trafficking, drug cartels, money laundering, even fraud schemes meant to entrap immigrants. HSI is the country’s second-largest investigative agency, with more than 6,000 special agents in 47 countries around the world.

HSI works closely with confidential informants. An HSI agent will develop a source with useful information as a means of investigating criminal activity. In exchange, the informant receives compensation in the form of cash, a work permit, and, in some cases, immigration benefits. Some of the money HSI seizes — we don’t know how much — is used to pay the agency’s informants.

The world of ICE-informant relationships is necessarily murky, according to former HSI agent Jerry Robinette. “You’re picking at a very sensitive topic that can be damaged by the light,” Robinette told me. “But at the same time, people need to understand this is not a haphazard program.”

Working with confidential informants is a controlled process with oversight from HSI management, Robinette said. Informants are registered and receive identification numbers. Background checks are conducted. Supervisors must approve the agreements. Indeed, ICE dedicates an entire handbook solely to informants, though its contents have not been made public. A separate HSI handbook on asset forfeiture, leaked to The Intercept and also published by the independent media organization Unicorn Riot, says that ICE should “identify, cultivate, and retain assistance” from so-called confidential informants “who are intimately involved with targeted criminal organizations.” According to the handbook, employing an informant should be a last resort, and the decision to do so should be made only after weighing the informant’s reliability against other factors. Every dollar paid to informants should be carefully considered and documented.

However, several news stories have highlighted the pitfalls of ICE-informant relationships. Agents have fostered improper liaisons with informants. In one case, ICE knew an informant participated in killings yet continued working with him anyway (the agent was later fired). ICE, along with the FBI, uses informants and then works to deport them. ICE defenders like Robinette paint these as isolated incidents, and, of course, most ICE informants don’t make the news.

Carlos says he entered the U.S. seeking asylum three times, starting in 2012. The exact circumstances of those entries remain in dispute; he was deported each time. Finally, in 2014, he entered illegally. Because of those prior deportations, ICE could have removed him immediately when it encountered him in March 2017.

Instead, beginning in April 2017, Carlos would show up every month at the ICE office in downtown Sacramento. He’d enter the stone and glass office building, pass through the metal detector, and sit in the foyer, waiting for his name to be called. Legos and other toys sat in a corner to keep children occupied.

ICE released Carlos on an order of supervision, an arrangement in which the agency temporarily agrees not to deport an undocumented person. Under the order, the immigrant must meet certain conditions, such as showing up for monthly or annual check-ins, wearing an ankle monitor, and obtaining permission from ICE before traveling out of state.

On Carlos’s order of supervision, agents checked a box marked “Other,” and added the words: “Terms discussed in person.” Those terms, according to Carlos and his attorney, were the following: In exchange for his liberty, Carlos would report names of other undocumented individuals to ICE. He was required to provide at least three names over a three-month period. A separate document later written by his ICE handler confirmed that Carlos was released “with the agreement the SUBJECT would report monthly and provide leads on criminal aliens.” The officers in Carlos’s case did not expressly state their plans, but deportation would have been one potential outcome for any individuals Carlos named.

However, Carlos did not have a criminal history, and he was not aware of any acquaintances with convictions. He agonized over what to do. His wife, Heidi, was experiencing complications with her pregnancy. At one point he got so desperate that, at an ICE agent’s suggestion, he considered approaching a random group of men at the neighborhood park where he played pickup soccer to ask if they knew anyone with a criminal past, but he chickened out. He found it troubling that immigration officials were conscripting him to do their job for them and wondered what would stop ICE from simply deporting him when they were done using him.

So, Carlos did the only thing he could think to do: At his check-ins month after month, he refused to provide names. He’d simply sign the form indicating that he hadn’t absconded, answer basic questions about his livelihood, and head home.  The allotted three months passed. At first, Carlos says, ICE officials seemed agitated by his refusal to provide leads, but each time, they released him.

Four months into this experiment, as Carlos sat in the waiting room, he saw a man enter the ICE office holding a scrap of paper. Carlos was called in 10 minutes later. When he sat down, Carlos noticed the same paper on a desk. An agent asked him if he had brought the paper, which Carlos saw had a Mexican name on it. Carlos said no. The agent warned him that the agent’s boss would get angry if Carlos didn’t supply any names. It didn’t matter to ICE whether Carlos knew the person had been arrested or convicted of a crime, the agent told him; as long as Carlos simply suspected an undocumented person of criminal activity, that was enough. The alternative, the agent reminded Carlos, was that he would be deported. Still, ICE permitted Carlos to leave. Two months later, he wouldn’t be so lucky.

The other main ICE sub-agency, Enforcement and Removal Operations, “enforces the nation’s immigration laws in a fair and effective manner,” according to its website. ERO detains and deports undocumented immigrants; it has no formal role in gathering intelligence or battling criminal activity.

According to conversations with five former ICE employees, ERO is not structured to work with confidential informants. Mostly, it facilitates the benefits needed for HSI to do its job. For example, it can delay deportation of an informant or release the informant from detention on supervision. Unlike their counterparts at HSI, ERO officers do not have a specific mandate to conduct undercover operations. They do not dedicate units to handling confidential informants, nor are they given special guidance in finding, training, and monitoring informants.

Yet ERO was the sub-agency that negotiated the agreement with Carlos, and four of the former ICE employees revealed that ERO does, at times, use informants. “ICE ERO does not utilize a confidential informant program,” ICE spokesperson Richard Rocha said. “However, when appropriate, ERO may consider available discretionary options in furtherance of an individual’s continued cooperation with ongoing investigative matters.”

In the eyes of the former ICE employees, a crucial line distinguishes a formal, confidential informant from an informal source of information. ERO interviews many individuals while searching for an undocumented immigrant to remove. If ERO knocks on the door of an individual who has disappeared, for instance, agents could ask their apartment manager if the person left a forwarding address. The apartment manager is not a registered “confidential informant,” but simply the kind of data source used in any law enforcement investigation.

A recently retired ERO field office director in Texas dealt with a handful of confidential informants during his career. In an interview, he downplayed ERO’s use of informants in comparison with HSI and would not provide details on any specific relationships he developed with informants. The former field office director, who asked not to be identified because he is engaged in litigation against the agency, also said he had never received formal training on informants — he’d simply learned “on the job” from a colleague who had worked with informants in the past. While he had always registered informants, he said he had never paid any of them. That was HSI’s thing. Instead, he would reward informants by getting them out of detention or agreeing not to deport them. Informants were always used to target a specific individual for removal, rather than in an open-ended search, as in Carlos’s case, he added. At times, a source would approach ICE and ask to help, rather than the other way around.

However, for the immigrant, any relief from deportation is temporary. “A case can be prolonged as long as he’s cooperating and everybody’s happy,” said Robinette, the former HSI agent. “When the music stops and you can’t or won’t deliver, what’s next? What’s next is you’re put in deportation proceedings.”

A more permanent solution is called an S visa, often nicknamed a “snitch visa.” The government allots 250 of these per year, across federal law enforcement agencies, to immigrants who help officials in criminal and terrorism investigations. However, the agency itself has to apply and push for an informant to receive an S-visa, not the immigrant or their attorney. Rarely do risk-averse senior bureaucrats seek responsibility for sponsoring a visa for an informant. The State Department, for example, has awarded only six S visas since the category was established in 1994. Immigration attorneys frequently refer to the S visa as a unicorn.

Mike Magee, another former ERO agent, said he never employed informants but wished he had. When told about ERO’s handling of Carlos, Magee called it a “novel” tactic. Ostensibly, he said, many immigrants live in the same community and would be well positioned to find others for ERO.

“It’s something, as a manager, I would have tried. Maybe I’d do it for four months or so and see how it turned out,” Magee said. According to Magee, senior ICE bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., often judge local ERO field agents based on statistics: The more undocumented individuals they arrest, the more favorably their performance is viewed. But Magee also noted that using informants to report other undocumented folks could catch people ICE wasn’t interested in, and those arrests wouldn’t boost the numbers. “If it’s just plain Jose worker, it’s a waste of time.” Magee said. “It’s not the mission.”

Both Magee and the former Texas field office director said they’d try a new policy only after running it by ICE attorneys and supervisors in Washington, D.C., to establish its legality. Javad Khazaeli, who spent six years as an ICE attorney, said he couldn’t think of any law the practice violated. “I don’t know whether this is illegal,” he said. “It is for sure abnormal, and in my view, very problematic. I have a hard time seeing how any supervisor could approve a wild goose chase like this with a person’s freedom in the balance.”

Michael Kohler, who was an ICE lawyer from 2003 to 2008, said that when he was at the agency, ERO started working with informants more regularly. But while HSI carefully controlled their use, ERO was not exactly a well-oiled machine. ERO “tried to piggy-back off of what HSI did,” Kohler wrote in an email.

Carlos, now 28, lives in a studio apartment in north Sacramento with Heidi and their three young children, ages 9, 6, and 8 months. When I visited one early morning in June, I passed through a corrugated metal fence painted with the Mexican flag. Carlos and his family were just waking up. Sitting in his kitchen as Heidi prepared café con canela and their kids watched a Spanish cartoon version of “Wheels on the Bus,” Carlos told me why he is speaking publicly about his encounter with ICE.

At around 11 a.m. on September 26, 2017, he checked in at the Sacramento ICE field office for a sixth time. After waiting for 20 minutes, an agent told him that he would be arrested for failing to cooperate.

A narrative of the arrest, written later by one of the ICE agents, confirmed that they planned to detain Carlos expressly because of his refusal to cooperate: “Due to SUBJECT’s inability to provide any assistance to ICE the decision was made that SUBJECT would be taken into custody on his next reporting date as of 09/26/2017.”

They fingerprinted Carlos and stashed him in a cell. Several hours later, the agents sat him down at a desk and ordered him to sign a form. Since Carlos could not read or understand English, he refused. He asked what the document said. Carlos said an agent started screaming at him in Spanish, calling him “pendejo,” or “idiot.” The agent ranted about how Carlos was squandering an opportunity and was being deported because he wouldn’t help ICE.

Suddenly, Carlos alleges, two agents jumped on top of him. Each yanked one of Carlos’s arms behind him, and one of them slammed Carlos’s head against the desk. A third agent walked behind him with the document and an ink pad in an attempt to get Carlos’s fingerprints as a form of signature. Carlos started screaming and crying uncontrollably. The excruciating pain in his shoulders and neck made it feel as if he were being tortured. He pleaded with them to stop. They didn’t. Carlos said he asked to see a lawyer. “An attorney won’t save you now,” Carlos recalled one of the agents telling him in Spanish.

Eventually, Carlos said, the agents stopped trying to force him to sign the papers and bussed him to a nearby detention center, where they kept him overnight. The next day, back in the office, Carlos was questioned by a supervisor. When he again refused to sign a document he did not understand, agents slammed him against the table and repeatedly kneed him in the ribs and sides, Carlos said. This time, other detainees in the holding area who heard Carlos’s screams banged on the bars of their cells and pleaded for the agents to stop. In letters written afterward, which were obtained by Carlos’s attorneys and reviewed by The Intercept, two detainees confirmed the basic details of Carlos’s account. “I only hope that this note is read so they don’t abuse more people,” a detainee named Juan wrote.

After being assaulted for several minutes, Carlos could no longer withstand the pain, he told me. He agreed to sign the paper. The officers pressed his fingers onto the ink pad and then onto the document. Then they returned him to detention. While there, Carlos repeatedly sought medical attention but was denied access to pain relievers for nearly three weeks, he said. With Heidi’s help, he found a lawyer who petitioned ICE for his release. He was freed from detention two months later.

ICE did not respond to requests for comment on Carlos’s allegations. But Luis Angel Reyes Savalza, Carlos’s attorney, shared an email in which his firm had asked ICE to conduct an inquiry into the incident. Dana L. Fishburn, then acting deputy field office director in ERO’s San Francisco office, responded that she had done so and found no evidence to support Carlos’s claims of physical assault. “As you are aware, this is a serious allegation, the safety and welfare of all aliens in custody is of the upmost importance to ICE,” Fishburn wrote. “We do not and would not force anyone to sign a document.”

Rocha, the ICE spokesperson, added: “Allegations of abuse and employee misconduct are taken seriously by ICE and referred to the Office of Professional Responsibility.” Neither Carlos nor Reyes Savalza filed a complaint with the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is responsible for handling cases of employee misconduct for the agency. Instead, Reyes Savalza said, Carlos is considering other legal avenues.

Reyes Savalza asserted that the alleged assault was retaliation for refusing to snitch. “We’re obviously concerned that there are more of these cases happening out in the community, that there [are] more people like Carlos who are forced to make up allegations against other people to save themselves,” Reyes Savalza told me.

I spoke with 10 immigration attorneys who have represented clients who worked as informants for ICE. All said they were not surprised by Carlos’s story, but none had heard of anything exactly like it before.

ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies have been intensely monitoring American Muslim communities for decades, said Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York who also directs its Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic. Kassem shared the story of one client in the greater New York City area who was approached by HSI to provide the names and license plate numbers of undocumented members of his mosque. “Names of other undocumented people was the ask,” Kassem said. “I call it a fishing expedition, because [they’re not looking for] one specific person.”

Like Carlos, Kassem’s client received a warning from ICE: If you don’t give us what we want, we’ll make sure you’re deported.

“This idea [that] you’re trying to get immigrants to turn on each other — it’s a secret police mentality,” said Zac Sanders, an immigration attorney in New York City. Since most immigrants are law abiding, it’s likely that people with no criminal history would be caught in the dragnet, he said. “You can watch cop shows on TV and know it’s ridiculous.”

In his kitchen, Carlos said he still suffers from shoulder pain. He is sharing his story in the hope that the agency won’t repeat the same tactic with others. “They shouldn’t treat people that way. It was totally illegal, what they did to me.”

Carlos is no longer eligible for asylum. In his telling, after years of threats from cartels in Michoacán, he presented himself at the border in 2013 to seek asylum. Normally, Carlos would have been allowed into the country while pursuing that claim. Instead, Carlos said the border patrol agent was in a “bad mood” and his Spanish was poor. In an order dated March 23, 2013, an agent wrote that Carlos was a citizen of Mexico and was inadmissible to the United States. Nothing about asylum is listed on the document, and Carlos was quickly deported. He was removed twice more, three weeks later and almost a year after that, according to an ICE document; Carlos says he tried unsuccessfully to make an asylum claim both times. In 2014, he crossed undetected, and was living in Sacramento until ICE arrested him in 2017. In those three years, despite the fact that an immigrant has 12 months after arriving in the U.S. to apply for asylum, he did not try again.

After Carlos hired an attorney following the alleged assault in October 2017, he formally asserted a fear of returning to Mexico, which entitled him to an interview with an asylum officer. However, since the one-year window has closed, Carlos is now asking for protection from deportation under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. His next court hearing is scheduled for September 2019.

Rueda is the family patriarch and its most outspoken opposition activist. Carlos had followed him into political organizing. When the family was threatened, Carlos and several other relatives sought asylum in the United States, while Rueda stayed to fight for what he believed in.

Yet when I mentioned that I was writing an article about his grandson’s experience with ICE, Rueda’s face darkened. He said he always tells Carlos: “Do whatever the government tells you to do, and everything will be fine.”

Update: September 24, 2018, 9:15 p.m.
This story has been updated to include comment received after publication from ICE spokesperson Richard Rocha.

Top photo: Carlos Rueda Cruz holds his 8-month-old son, Santiago, at his home in Sacramento, Calif., on Sept. 10, 2018.

The post Undocumented Immigrant Faces a Choice: Become an Informant for ICE or Be Deported appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter, provided to The Intercept ahead of its public release, lists a total of 12 requests for information regarding Amazon’s facial recognition service, branded as “Rekognition,” including the names of any law enforcement or government agencies that use the system and data on how the service could enable, or itself engage in, discrimination, including racial and gender bias.

“The disproportionally high arrest rates for members of the black community make the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement problematic,” the letter reads, “because it could serve to reinforce this trend.”

According to an Ellison aide, the letter is an attempt to enact at least a baseline level of congressional oversight for the tech giant — an attempt that comes less than two months after congressional hearings that tried to do the same for Facebook.

Amazon came under fire earlier this week after the American Civil Liberties Union and its affiliates, as well as 35 other civil liberties organizations, released a public letter expressing concerns about how Amazon markets its technology to law enforcement agencies. The ACLU letter coincided with the release of a trove of documents, which the organization obtained through public records requests and after a six-month investigation, that shed light on the company’s relationship and correspondence with law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Florida.

Right now, it’s known that at least two governmental agencies — the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon and Orlando Police Department in Florida — use Rekognition software. Among the demands in Ellison and Cleaver’s letter is a list of other law enforcement customers that currently use the software, a list of private companies that develop tools that use Rekognition software for use by law enforcement agencies, and the results of any independent auditing that Amazon Web Services may have conducted to identify error or bias in the software. Importantly, the congressmen are also asking for any “terms of use, policies, or other restrictions” the company places on the use of its technology by customers, including police departments. The letter asks for a response to its inquiries from Bezos by June 20.

“I worry about the threat it presents for the targeting of black and brown communities in particular.”

Amazon released its Rekognition technology in November 2016, through its cloud services platform Amazon Web Services, and soon after started marketing the software specifically to law enforcement agencies like those in Washington County and Orlando. The company says the software can identify people in real time by searching image databases, and also has a “person tracking” feature that “makes investigation and monitoring of individuals easy and accurate.”

“I worry about [facial recognition technology’s] potential for abuse as a tool for warrantless surveillance,” Ellison said in a statement to The Intercept, “and the threat it presents for over-policing and targeting of black and brown communities in particular.”

The emails obtained by the ACLU also reveal that an Amazon employee attempted to set up a meeting between someone at the Washington County Sheriff’s Office and a representative from an Amazon customer called Federal Signal that manufactures body cameras. What’s more, in its marketing materials, Amazon boasts that Utility Associates, a manufacturer of body-worn cameras, is one of the users of the software. On the Rekognition website, Utility Chief Technology Officer Simon Araya brags that using Rekognition in conjunction with body-worn camera technology “dramatically decreases the time needed to act and provides a valuable situational awareness tool for law enforcement” — in other words, officers could engage in real-time surveillance in the course of their duties.

Cleaver has long called for the widespread use of body-worn cameras by law enforcement officers, and in 2015 successfully pushed to allocate $22.5 million in federal funding for that purpose, as part of an omnibus spending bill. Ellison and Cleaver write in their letter that this kind of collaboration could transform police body-worn cameras “from tools designed for officer accountability into surveillance devices aimed at the public.”

The post Congressional Democrats Demand Answers About Amazon’s Facial Recognition Technology appeared first on The Intercept.

Survey results included in the report suggest that very few people in Los Angeles bear the brunt of most police interactions: Two percent of residents who responded to the survey reported being stopped by police between 11 and 30 times a week or more, while 76 percent of respondents reported never being stopped at all. The 300 survey respondents were distributed across geography, race, age, and gender. In focus groups, people who lived in areas heavily targeted by police described a state of constant surveillance. Asking “how often do I see police in my area is like asking me how many times do I see a bird in the day,” said one resident.

Asking “how often do I see police in my area is like asking me how many times do I see a bird in the day.”

What’s more, the LAPD has been using technology from the data-mining firm Palantir that may amplify that concentration, as part of a predictive policing program that targets and surveils specific individuals within select neighborhoods based off their recent history with the criminal justice system.

Officers and analysts who work on Operation LASER, or Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration, are tasked with maintaining an ongoing list of community residents to monitor, by creating “Chronic Offender Bulletins” for so-called persons of interest. Each of the 16 department divisions that currently use the program is required to maintain a minimum of a dozen of these “bulletins,” which are intended to help officers “identify the most active violent chronic offenders” in a given geographical area.

That identification process has two stages: an initial screening phase, in which a “crime intelligence analyst” subjectively decides whether the police records, like arrest reports and field interview cards, associated with an individual are “relevant” enough to move them to a “workup” phase. The “workup” involves software provided by Palantir that pulls data on criminal history and affiliations, and from license plate readers and social media networks, and uses it to create a “chronic offender score” for the individual.

Once someone is deemed a sufficient threat based off their score, officers send them letters and are encouraged to knock on their doors to let them know they’re being monitored. Officers are also instructed to look out for opportunities to stop or arrest them (if they have a warrant out). An October 2017 version of a checklist that instructs analysts and officers on how to deal with chronic offenders was among the documents that Stop LAPD Spying obtained through a California Public Records Act request. (Stop LAPD Spying first provided the documents to In Justice Today, which reported on them Tuesday.)

“If they don’t get stopped, they stop being on the list,” said Dennis Kato, an LAPD deputy chief, in an interview with The Intercept. In other words, the only way for someone to get off a chronic offenders list for an area is to not have any interactions with the police — a sort of Catch-22 since the program is intended to flag individuals for increased police attention. And if someone is removed from the list, they aren’t notified. “I don’t think it’s an ideal system,” Kato said. By early 2019, he says, the entire city of Los Angeles will be using the LASER program.

The report also highlights another predictive policing program currently in use by the LAPD, called PredPol. Both Operation LASER and PredPol are sponsored by the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance’s SMART Policing Initiative, which aims to use “evidence-based, data-driven” policing strategies to try and pre-empt and prevent crime.

PredPol software, marketed by a private company, relies on a machine-learning algorithm much like the ones used by corporate giants such as Facebook and Amazon for advertising purposes. It’s a mathematical model that inputs three variables: where a crime was committed, when it was committed, and what type of crime it was. The model is used to calculate “hot spots” throughout a given metropolitan area —150 square-meter areas where, theoretically, certain types of crimes are more likely to be committed on a given day — which patrol officers use to plan out their daily routes. Studies have already shown that PredPol technology re-enforces racially biased policing patterns and practices, but the technology remains in use by the LAPD and at least 50 other law enforcement agencies around the country, according to a PredPol spokesperson.

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition received October 2017 documents on Operation LASER after filing a lawsuit against the police department in February of this year, but is still waiting on more documents related to the program, including its funding and data sources, according to Hamid Khan, one of the coalition’s co-founders.

“Predictive policing programs … enable the continuation of decades of discriminatory and racist policing under the apparent neutrality of objective data.”

Both programs draw on scientific disciplines: PredPol is adapted from models that predict earthquake aftershocks, while the documents obtained by the coalition indicate that the LAPD uses a series of medical analogies to describe the functions and goals of Operation LASER — from the very title of the program, to describing the amount of visible police presence in an area as a “dosage,” to calling repeat offenders “chronic.” The BJA, the federal bureau which sponsors the local program, admits as much: Operation LASER “is analogous to laser surgery, where a trained medical doctor uses modern technology to remove tumors or improve eyesight,” according to a BJA report.

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition criticizes the scientific assumptions that underlie predictive policing for “pathologizing” individuals and entire neighborhoods, and says that the programs “enable the continuation of decades of discriminatory and racist policing under the apparent neutrality of objective data.”

Unlike PredPol hot spots, so-called LASER zones are based off geographical data and determined in part based on observations that analysts make about a neighborhood and its residents. According to an LAPD document, the analysts ask questions like, “What they were doing? Talking to neighbors? Walking? Driving down the streets slowly? Playing chess in the park? Or, are they dealing drugs on the street corner or just hanging out?”

The coalition’s community-based focus group results indicate that residents, while not always aware of the details of police surveillance in their communities, nonetheless have a sense that it is occurring. “I feel like they already know who you are by the time they stop you or give you a citation,” one resident said. “They already know your name and who you are hanging out with.”

Update: May 11, 2018, 1:35 p.m.
This article has been updated to note that In Justice Today first reported on the documents obtained by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.

Top photo: LAPD officers search for robbery suspects near Beverly Drive and Juanita Avenue in the early morning hours of May 5, 2018.

The post Aided by Palantir, the LAPD Uses Predictive Policing to Monitor Specific People and Neighborhoods appeared first on The Intercept.

It passed statewide anyway, and in 2016 the people of Turner were again asked to vote on weed. This time the question was whether to allow recreational marijuana businesses in their community. To nobody’s surprise, they voted overwhelmingly — 63 percent — to prohibit the businesses in the unincorporated parts of their county.  But to everybody’s surprise, this time, the town voted 51 percent in favor of allowing pot businesses within the city limits. “We were actually shocked,” Mayor Gary Tiffin told me.

The town’s collective spit-take was well-founded. They had screwed up. An in-depth analysis of all “local option” marijuana votes in Oregon persuasively suggests that Turner legalized marijuana businesses by mistake, as the result of two confusingly worded questions appearing at the bottom of a ballot.

The saga of marijuana in Turner, Oregon, is a prime example of both the benefits and limits of direct democracy.

The process started in 2014. At the time, despite strong public support for marijuana legalization, local politicians in Oregon — like in the rest of the country — were reluctant to embrace the reform. So, organizations used ballot initiatives to bypass state legislators and put the issue directly to the public. On the macro level, the system worked as intended: The voters got what they wanted, even when their representatives refused to represent them.

After the public approved Measure 91 in Oregon, legalizing marijuana across the state, the legislature enacted a new rule for local regulation, a compromise of sorts. In most places, if a city or county wanted to locally prohibit recreational marijuana businesses, they needed to put the ban on the next general election ballot. The problem in Turner was that people don’t always pay close attention to questions on local issues that appear near the bottom of their ballots.

As a result of the legislature’s modification, six counties and 54 cities in Oregon voted on local marijuana bans, creating a large data set to study. The results from all these local elections show that recreational marijuana doesn’t seem to suffer from a “NIMBY,”  or “not in my backyard,” problem, nor does it benefit from a “YIMBY,” or “yes in my backyard,” mentality. Besides a few localities, which had unusual results due to unique circumstances, for the most part, how communities voted on statewide marijuana legalization, in 2014, matched very closely with how they voted in 2016, on local marijuana business bans. Voters in Oregon basically feel the same way about legalization in theory as they do in practice within their own communities. This is important to know moving forward, since politicians will sometimes oppose ideas that poll well in general, because they believe their voters won’t really support those same ideas being implemented near them. (Wind farms, compost centers, and other popular, environmentally beneficial projects are often opposed in practice by people who support them in general.)

By looking at all the precincts in counties with a local marijuana ban on the ballot, it becomes clear that how the question was worded was very important. When the ballot required a “yes” vote to prohibit marijuana businesses, the pro-marijuana vote was, on average, 6 percentage points higher than when the question was phrased so as to require a “yes” vote to allow marijuana businesses.

When county ban and city ban questions were phrased the same way, how precincts voted on the two questions was nearly identical. But in a few cities, like Turner, residents needed to vote “no” if they wanted to prohibit marijuana businesses in their county but also vote “yes” if they wanted to maintain their city ban.

If you’re confused at this point, you are far from alone. Now, imagine being late for work, nearing the end of your ballot. Indeed, only in these precincts did the vote on these two questions diverge significantly, which strongly indicates the variance was driven by voter confusion.

This is a downside of direct democracy, especially on the local level. The amount of time that voters put into seriously considering each question is likely very limited. (And the amount of time that town officials put into thinking about how to phrase questions in an understandable way also appears to be rather limited, in some places.)

This mistake has created real issues for Turner. Since the town was left without a ban, according to Mayor Tiffin, the city government was forced to engage in a “laborious and tough lawsuit from a person in town who wants to put a grow operation in a residential area.” The first marijuana store within the city’s limits is projected to open in the coming weeks.

There is a possibility that the voters of Turner might get a chance to undo their mistake. Tiffin said they are considering putting the issue on the 2018 ballot. But first, voters will get a chance to sample the coming shop’s wares and might have a change of heart. This time, they might legalize on purpose.

Top photo: The owner of the Sumpter Nugget marijuana dispensary restocks inventory on July 2, 2017 in Sumpter, Oregon.

The post The Town That Accidentally Legalized Marijuana appeared first on The Intercept.

“Just like a maid in the house — that’s what her life was with him. And sex when he needed it out of her,” Adieh told The Intercept. “I went crazy when she told me all this.”

Now, nearly two years later, Salman is on trial for the only charges being brought in relation to the Pulse massacre. She has been charged with aiding and abetting her husband’s support of a foreign terrorist organization, as well as with obstruction of justice. Jury deliberations in her case began Wednesday.

While questions remain about the facts of the case, the abuse Salman endured is indisputable — and it highlights the widespread phenomenon of domestic abuse victims being prosecuted and incarcerated for acts committed by their abusers, or for crimes they were forced into. Both prosecutors and Orlando community members understandably want to seek justice for Pulse victims. But Salman’s family and advocates for defendants in situations like hers say that few are stopping to ask the question: Why is a domestic abuse victim being tried for crimes that her abuser committed?

Gail Smith, the director of the Women in Prison Project, a subdivision of the Correctional Association of New York, says that Salman is far from the only abuse victim she has seen prosecuted when the perpetrator of the crime has died or isn’t available. “The prosecution will find somebody to punish,” Smith told The Intercept. Abuse victims often end up being that “somebody.”

“The prosecution will find somebody to punish,” Smith told The Intercept. Abuse victims often end up being that “somebody.”

In courts around the country, abuse survivors like Salman regularly face criminal charges. While Salman’s case is unique in its focus on an alleged act of terrorism, as opposed to felony murder or other charges, the underlying phenomenon of abuse-to-criminalization is remarkably commonplace. Almost 80 percent of women who are currently in federal and state prisons were victims of physical or sexual abuse before their incarceration. And the Correctional Association of New York, which has been monitoring New York prisons since 1846, estimates that around 75 percent of incarcerated women have experienced severe abuse at the hands of an intimate partner during adulthood.

There’s no good way to measure how many of those women end up in prison as a result of charges directly related to that abuse, but many advocates who work with criminalized abuse survivors argue that it’s the majority. The difficulty in tracking such cases stems from a host of factors, including that not all victims of abuse realize they’ve experienced it until years later, meaning it isn’t reflected in court filings or other official documentation.

There are a number of different scenarios that wind up with abuse survivors on the defense side of a courtroom. Perhaps the most obvious examples concern people who are prosecuted for retaliating against their abusers in acts of self-defense. In another high-profile Florida case, Marissa Alexander was convicted in 2012 of aggravated assault for firing a warning shot at her husband, whom she said in court had been abusive. But there are other situations that lead to charges against abuse victims: Many women are charged with failure to protect their children from their abusive partners, or for failure to report the criminal activity of their abusers to authorities. Others, like Salman, are charged with aiding and abetting their abusers in crimes they didn’t commit themselves. In many of these latter cases, victims face prosecution for felony murder if they were present when abusive partners killed their children, family members, acquaintances, or strangers. The charges are often brought even when the perpetrator of the violence is dead.

Colby Lenz works with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Survived and Punished, two legal and legislative advocacy groups for criminalized abuse survivors. One of the women Lenz works with was trying to escape her abusive husband with their son when the husband killed the son. She received a life sentence without parole for a felony murder charge.

“You hear a story like hers, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God … how could this be real?’” says Lenz. “And then you hear a hundred more stories that are just as absurd, that are so, so similar.”

Smith, who has been working with incarcerated women for over 30 years, described the case of a young mother who was forced to accompany her abusive partner to an armed robbery he had planned and serve as a lookout. When he died in a subsequent shootout with the police, she was was charged with felony murder for his death.

“He controlled her completely, and he forced her to accompany him,” Smith told The Intercept. “She was a hostage, basically. She did not have a choice about this. That’s an example of how a prosecutorial mindset can punish someone who has essentially done what she had to do in order to not die at the hands of her abuser.”

Advocates say that prosecutorial discretion allows negative public attitudes toward domestic violence victims to enter the courtroom. When presenting arguments to a judge or jury, prosecutors often engage in victim-blaming and cast doubt on abuse allegations, for instance, asking victims why they never told family members or filed for a protective order.

One attorney who worked as a public defender in Florida for over 25 years told The Intercept that when there are prior reports of violence and medical records that support a victim-defendant’s claims of abuse, the litigation is easier, and a prosecutor sometimes drops the case or settles it quickly. (The attorney declined to be named in order to protect her clients.) Other times, when there isn’t much concrete documentation of the abuse itself — no reports of injuries or protective orders — a defendant’s victim status becomes contested and litigation can go on for years.

However, even in cases in which there is documentation, cultural and public misconceptions about domestic violence can result in a conviction, or at least a very drawn-out case. “I worked with one woman who had just gotten out of the hospital due to severe abuse and subsequently, used a knife to defend herself in a moment of abuse, killing her husband in the process,” says the former public defender. “We used self-defense and battered women’s syndrome [as legal tactics], and the case ended up being dropped by the state, but not until after several trials.”

The central dispute in Noor Salman’s case is whether she actually knew about Omar Mateen’s plans to carry out the attack on Pulse. U.S. attorneys have charged Salman with aiding and abetting her husband in material support of a foreign terrorist organization (in this case, the Islamic State), as well as with obstruction of justice, for allegedly trying to mislead the FBI in statements she had given them in the hours after the attack. The FBI agent who had initially questioned Salman said in court that during the interrogation, she seemed too calm and uninterested in what her husband had just done. Prosecutors have described Salman’s actions as “cold,” and one of them said during opening statements earlier this month that Salman had given Mateen “a green light” to commit the massacre.

To counter this narrative, Salman’s defense lawyers have argued that she had been unaware of Mateen’s plans and was herself a victim of his violent tendencies inside their home. “Omar Mateen is a monster. Noor Salman is a mother, not a monster. Her only sin is she married a monster,” one of Salman’s defense attorneys, Linda Moreno, told jurors during opening statements. Her defense team submitted testimony from a nurse on Salman’s behalf, which read: “Her behavior was entirely consistent with severely abused women who are completely controlled by a highly abusive male partner.” Salman’s attorneys also emphasize that the FBI had questioned Salman for 17 consecutive hours after the massacre without a lawyer present and without reading her Miranda rights.

During the long interrogation session, prosecutors said Salman had made a variety of contradictory statements, including some that suggest she had known of Mateen’s plans to attack Pulse in advance. However, research has shown that the trauma of domestic violence can lead to memory lapses, emotional numbness, and difficulty concentrating, among other effects.

Regardless of whether the jury concludes Salman had been aware of her husband’s plans, Mateen’s history of abuse is well-established. Mateen’s first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, described to The Intercept in excruciating detail the abuse she had faced at the hands of Mateen two years before he met Salman.

According to Yusufiy, he had controlled every aspect of her life. Just a few months into their short marriage, Mateen started hitting her and restricting her communication with her family. The only person he would allow her to contact on a daily basis was her cousin; even then, he’d start hitting her while she was on the phone so that the conversations didn’t go on for too long. As the abuse got worse, he restricted her outside communication even further to make sure she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.

“As time went on, I was really feeling trapped — and I was trapped,” said Yusufiy. “I was literally being kept hostage.”

“I was really feeling trapped — and I was trapped. I was literally being kept hostage.”

Once, when Yusufiy was on the phone with her mother, Mateen sat in the same room and watched her to ensure she didn’t say too much. When her mother asked if her husband had hit her, she started crying. “Omar saw me crying. He came over and slapped me so hard, the phone fell out of my hand and broke, and I hit my head against the headboard,” she said.

“He would do a lot of things behind my back that I had no clue about, that he wouldn’t ever tell me, and I wouldn’t question it because he would abuse the crap out of me if I did,” Yusufiy told The Intercept. “He would definitely go out [and cheat] and tell me that it was his best friend, or his group of cops that he was friends with.” With the help of her family, Yusufiy left Mateen nine years ago. But she was forced to confront again the trauma of her past abuse in the aftermath of the shooting and the media scrutiny it drew.

Court filings, conversations with Salman’s relatives, and Salman’s own public statements about her marriage to Mateen indicate she suffered from the same kind of physical and psychological abuse that Yusufiy did. According to court filings, Mateen beat Salman while she was pregnant with their son, forced her to have sex against her wishes, and tried to choke her. Mateen also tightly controlled Salman’s daily activities and threatened to kill her, among other psychological abuses. In a domestic violence “danger assessment” submitted to the court, Salman marked that she believed he was actually capable of killing her. According to Adieh, Salman’s aunt, he had threatened to take away their child or kill her family members if she spoke about the abuse to others.

Yet early media coverage of Salman’s trial, when it discussed her abuse at all, tended to frame it as a hurdle to seeking justice in the case. For instance, the New York Times said in one article that the abuse would be “a challenge for prosecutors” because Salman’s attorneys were “likely to portray her as a victim of an abusive husband who kept her in the dark about his deadly plot.” A reporter for the Orlando CBS-affiliate WKMG wrote, “One question prosecutors may try to address is, does Salman’s fear as a victim of domestic violence give her a pass to alert authorities to Mateen’s behavior and plans to harm others?”

Advocates found this framing absurd: Anne Patterson, division director of STEPS to End Family Violence, a New York City-based organization that provides legal services, referrals, and counseling to battered women defendants, said prosecutors are supposed to pursue justice and public safety. “Referring to who she is, and her survivorship, as a prosecutorial challenge? That doesn’t seem to be connected to the pursuit of justice or public safety,” Patterson said. “It feels to me like that’s only the pursuit of victory, of a prosecutorial win.”

Many mass shooters have later been revealed to have had a history of abusing their intimate partners, but the media often covers this correlation as though the partners should have been able to stop their heinous acts. Yusufiy, Mateen’s ex-wife, said she has received her share of victim-blaming, too, for not pressing charges against Mateen during their marriage. “People have said if I had pressed charges, he would have never been allowed to own a gun,” she said. “So I have to live with that.”

Advocates say that prosecutors could change the way that courts handle abuse victims in these cases, because they have the ability to intervene early and bring lesser charges, or none at all. According to Patterson, it would be particularly beneficial to survivors if prosecutors conducted more careful assessments during arraignment to determine the role abuse may have played in the defendant’s case. In lieu of prosecutorial reforms, however, criminal defense attorneys have to use creative legal strategies to make a strong case for survivor-defendants.

When defendants are being charged for violently retaliating against their abusers, defense attorneys have had some success by invoking self-defense or “stand your ground” laws, alongside testimony on battering and its effects, to illustrate that their defendants had a reasonable fear for their lives. Sue Osthoff, director and co-founder of the Philadelphia-based National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, said that the battered women’s testimony has seen increasing acceptance in courtrooms since its first use in the late 1970s.

Experts also point to the “duress defense” as a possibility. In a recent New York Times op-ed about Salman’s trial, Georgetown law professor Deborah Epstein and victim advocate Kit Gruelle explained that “although rarely used, this defense excuses a person from criminal responsibility for actions if she had a well-grounded fear of incurring serious bodily injury for refusing to act and if she had no plausible hope of escaping the threat.”

Advocates have urged lawmakers to help address the harm that domestic violence inflicts before abuse victims encounter the criminal justice system. “If we had better, affordable legal resources that were also better trained in the issues surrounding domestic violence and so on, then our jails and prisons would be less packed with survivors,” said Lenz, of Survived and Punished.

“The pain that this man inflicted on this nightclub was pain that his partner has been enduring for, I imagine, the length of their relationship.”

In many of these prosecutions — especially in cases when victims are charged with crimes they didn’t even commit — victim-defendants themselves are in fact at the receiving end of the same kind of violence their abusers wrought on the world outside of their relationship.

“I have tremendous compassion for people who want there to be some accountability for the pain that they’ve experienced following the Pulse massacre,” said Patterson, from STEPS. “But they’re going about it all wrong, and it’s completely ignoring the fact that the pain that this man inflicted on this nightclub was pain that his partner has been enduring for, I imagine, the length of their relationship.”

Though Salman herself is not accused of any violence, protesters gathered outside of the courthouse in Florida during jury selection earlier this month to demand that Salman receive the death penalty for her husband’s crimes. (“FRY HER TILL SHE HAS NO PULSE,” one sign reportedly read.) When Salman was arrested in January 2017, Orlando Police Chief John W. Mina said, “Today, there is some relief in knowing that someone will be held accountable for that horrific crime.” Salman has been in custody — and unable to see her 5-year-old son — since that time.

“To make decisions about prosecution and sentencing without a deep understanding of how domestic violence works, the dynamics of that violence, is fundamentally unfair to survivors,” says Smith, of the Women in Prison Project. “We have a punitive legal system when it comes to criminal cases. It’s not so much about long-term justice for the community and reducing harm and addressing harm — it’s about punishment.”

Top photo: Al Salman (far left) leaves the federal courthouse following a court appearance by his niece Noor Salman on Jan. 17, 2017 in Oakland, Calif.

The post The Prosecution of Noor Salman, Pulse Shooter’s Widow, Highlights the Criminalization of Domestic Abuse Survivors appeared first on The Intercept.

Police killings, more than just the consequence of a few bad-apple officers that can be rooted out of the system, instead can be traced back to the discriminatory housing and economic policies of the mid-20th century, the study’s senior author, Michael Siegel, told The Intercept.

To conduct their analysis, Siegel and his colleagues at Boston University’s School of Public Health compared two numbers for each state: the black-white ratio in the rate of fatal police shootings from 2013 to mid-2017, and something the authors termed a “racism index.”

For the former statistic, they pulled data from the Mapping Police Violence project database, one of the most comprehensive aggregations of police-involved deaths in recent years. (Other studies have found that government-collected data on homicides, like those of the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control, severely underestimate the actual number of fatalities from police shootings.) To measure structural racism, the researchers used different government sources, such as the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to create an index for each state based off factors like residential segregation, as well as gaps in incarceration rates, educational attainment, economic class, and employment status between black and white people.

Of all the symptoms of structural racism, the factor that had the strongest relationship with police shooting disparities was residential segregation, followed by economic inequality.

Overall, for every 10-point jump in a state’s racism index, researchers found a 24 percent increase in the black-white ratio of fatal police shootings of unarmed victims. Starker still is the isolated effect of housing segregation: For a similar 10-point jump in a state’s segregation index, there was a 67 percent increase in the ratio of police shooting deaths. In other words, living in a highly segregated state severely increases the chance that an unarmed black civilian will die in an officer-involved shooting.

“It’s not just about how individuals interact, but how society is structured.”

This means that even attempts to reform police departments through programs like implicit bias training and police body cameras are inadequate, says Siegel. “These are solutions that try to intervene right at the last possible moment,” right before or during the moment an officer pulls the trigger, he said. In reality, the foundation for racialized police violence was laid by political and economic institutions created many decades ago, through mechanisms like Jim Crow-era redlining and so-called sundown town policies. “It’s not just about how individuals interact,” says Siegel, “but how society is structured.”

Surprisingly, the highest black-white ratios of police killings are concentrated in the Midwest, as are broader disparities in outcomes and living conditions like segregation and economic status. Among the states with the highest disparities in black versus white shooting victims and the highest racism index scores are Wisconsin and Illinois — home, respectively, to Milwaukee and Chicago, two of the most segregated cities in the country. While Siegel and other researchers conducted the study on the state level, they plan to continue conducting research on a city-by-city scale. Many of the highest-profile fatal police shootings over the last five years have occurred in the Midwest, including those of Laquan McDonald (Illinois), Philando Castile (Minnesota), Rekia Boyd (Illinois), Sylville Smith (Wisconsin), and Michael Brown (Missouri).

Southern states, contrary to popular perception, show less of a difference between black and white people in both fatal shootings and living conditions.

“It shows that this is not as simple as saying there’s more racism in the South,” says Siegel. “In parts of the Midwest, we have these highly segregated neighborhoods that police view in certain ways.”

The study also found that overall, unarmed black civilians are more than four and a half times more likely to be shot dead by the police than unarmed white civilians. The data also includes instances in which law enforcement maintains a victim was armed at the time of a shooting, even when that fact is disputed — which could mean a potential undercount in the rate of police shootings of the unarmed victims.

Social scientists have used two different theories to explain the racial disparity in officer-involved deaths. The first is that higher levels of interaction between police and black communities, supposedly a reflection of increased crime in those communities, lead to more fatal police shootings of black Americans. The second theory points to racism that influences interactions between law enforcement and black civilians. But even when the BU researchers controlled for the arrest rate of black individuals, a measure of interaction levels between officers and civilians, they still found that structural racism had a strong effect on the fatal police shootings of black individuals, lending more credence to the second theory, according to Siegel.

“It’s pretty dramatic to think about what happened decades ago having a public health impact right now.”

As with any academic study, there are caveats. For instance, Siegel urges readers not to take police shooting rates in states with smaller populations at face value. Maine, for example, has the highest ratio of black-white fatal police shootings, but Siegel says, “There’s just such a small number of black people in Maine to begin with that if you even have one person being shot, it appears to be a really high rate.”

One of the most notable takeaways from the study is that it frames police violence not only as a criminal justice issue, but as a critical public health issue. “It’s pretty dramatic to think about what happened decades ago having a public health impact right now,” says Siegel. “Fatalities are health outcomes. This is really about racial disparities in health outcomes and the health and safety of an entire population. We really need to look at it as such.”

Top photo: Minneapolis NAACP president, Nekima Levy-Pounds, leads a chant of “Hands up, don’t shoot,” for Philando Castile outside Governor’s Mansion on July 7, 2016 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The post A Hidden Factor in Police Shootings of Black Americans: Decades of Housing Segregation appeared first on The Intercept.