John Kelly warned Trump that Americans will "piss" on his grave
Then-chief of staff John Kelly told the famously petty Trump that if he didn't lower the flag after John McCain died the public would come to his grave and "piss on it."
Take Action: Tell Congress to ban Trump from running in 2024!
VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump ditches dog whistle, issues brazen, direct threat
The disgraced ex-president made some very ominous remarks while discussing the possibility of the Justice Department prosecuting him for his litany of crimes.
Take Action: Tell the Justice Department to hold Trump accountable for his crimes!
Democrats get huge unexpected news in key swing state
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: Wow.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ripped for deceiving, relocating migrants: "Just plain wrong"
DeSantis took credit for the naked, inhumane political stunt, sending two planes packed with migrants from Venezuela and Colombia to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, under false promises of expedited work authorization.
Take Action: Hold corporations accountable for exploiting working people!
Senate Republicans withhold support of same-sex marriage bill until after midterm elections because they're afraid to upset precious base of bigots
Senate Democrats agreed to delay a vote protecting same-sex marriage until after the midterm elections, apparently in a bid to give Republicans political space to support the bill without upsetting their base. Placating bigotry — it's the American way!
Take Action: Demand Congress pass the Respect for Marriage Act!
MAGA judge sides with Trump against Justice Department, appoints special master
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FBI arrests ex-Kansas police detective long accused of sexually preying on Black women
For over 35 years, Roger Golubuski used his position to sexually abuse and assault Black women in Kansas City and falsely imprisoned one woman's son for murder when she rebuffed his advances. His fellow police officers were very well aware of his heinous behavior, but somehow there were no good apples brave enough to do anything about it.
📹 Richard Ojeda is OUTRAGED at MAGA-hacks Abbott & DeSantis
OD Action Partner: It doesn’t get more depraved, soulless or downright UN-AMERICAN than what these two are doing.
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The Republican Party's bigoted hysteria about the transgender community is reaching a dangerous fever pitch.
ADDED: THERE'S MORE TO THIS:
Wrongfully convicted Black man who spent 23 years in prison sues for $93 million
A Kansas man who spent 23 years in prison for a double murder he did not commit is seeking $93 million in damages from the county where he was convicted and a former detective who framed him.
THIS IS OVERDUE!
POOR POLICE POLICY leaves officers on the force, insurance carriers spread the costs to others....
SETTLEMENTS cause by POLICE MISCONDUCT need to be paid by those departments that failed to act.
Insurers Force Change on Police Departments Long Resistant to It
Kimberly Kindy/The Washington Post
The high cost of settlements over police misconduct has led insurers to demand police departments overhaul tactics or forgo coverage
A patrol officer spotted a white minivan with an expired license plate, flipped on his lights and siren, and when the driver failed to stop, gave chase. The driver fled in rush-hour traffic at speeds of up to 90 mph, as other officers joined in the pursuit. Ten miles later, the van slammed into a green Toyota Camry, leaving its 55-year-old driver, Brent Cox, permanently disabled.
That 2017 police chase was at the time the latest in a long line of questionable vehicle pursuits by officers of the St. Ann Police Department. Eleven people had been injured in 19 crashes during high-speed pursuits over the two prior years. Social justice activists and reporters were scrutinizing the department, and Cox and others were suing.
Undeterred, St. Ann Police Chief Aaron Jimenez stood behind the high-octane pursuits and doubled down on the department’s decades-old motto: “St. Ann will chase you until the wheels fall off.”
Then, an otherwise silent stakeholder stepped in. The St. Louis Area Insurance Trust risk pool — which provided liability coverage to the city of St. Ann and the police department — threatened to cancel coverage if the department didn’t impose restrictions on its use of police chases. City officials shopped around for alternative coverage but soon learned that costs would nearly double if they did not agree to their insurer’s demands.
Jimenez’s attitude swiftly shifted: In 2019, 18 months after the chase that left Cox permanently disabled, the chief and his 48-member department agreed to ban high-speed pursuits for traffic infractions and minor, nonviolent crimes.
“I didn’t really have a choice,” Jimenez said in an interview. “If I didn’t do it, the insurance rates were going to go way up. I was going to have to lose 10 officers to pay for it.”
Where community activists, use-of-force victims and city officials have failed to persuade police departments to change dangerous and sometimes deadly policing practices, insurers are successfully dictating changes to tactics and policies, mostly at small to medium-size departments throughout the nation.
The movement is driven by the increasingly large jury awards and settlements that cities and their insurers are paying in police use-of-force cases, especially since the 2020 deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Those cases led to settlements of $12 million and $27 million, respectively. Insurance companies are passing the costs — and potential future costs — on to their law enforcement clients.
Larger law enforcement agencies — like the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department or the New York Police Department — handle it in different ways, often by creating a special fund to finance settlements or by paying those costs from the county’s or city’s general fund. This insulates them from external demands by insurers.
Departments with a long history of large civil rights settlements have seen their insurance rates shoot up by 200 to 400 percent over the past three years, according to insurance industry and police experts.
Even departments with few problems are experiencing rate increases of 30 to 100 percent. Now, insurers also are telling departments that they must change the way they police.
In St. Ann, the impact has been profound.
Since the retooling, which took effect in January 2019, the number of police pursuits annually has increased slightly, but crashes during pursuits have dropped: from 25 in 2018 with eight injuries to 10 in 2021 with three injuries, according to data provided by the department. So far this year, the department says, there have been three crashes with no injuries.
The forced changes prompted Jimenez to equip his patrol cars with new technology to help nab motorists who try to outrun police. Sticky darts containing GPS trackers are shot from the front of patrol cars onto the backs of vehicles that speed away, so officers can fall back and catch up with them later.
While dozens of arrests have been made using the GPS technology, overall arrests in the city have fallen more than 30 percent since the change. Jimenez attributes that drop primarily to officers’ inability to chase motorists for minor infractions. “If you’re a proactive police department and you go out there and you search for a crime, your stats are higher because you’re fighting crime, you’re chasing more cars, you’re making more arrests,” he said.
John Chasnoff, a local activist who fought for years to get St. Ann to retool its chase policy, said he is dismayed that the catalyst for change was money — not the injuries to people including Cox.
“It’s an indictment on St. Ann police and their priorities that the voice of their insurers spoke louder than human lives,” Chasnoff said.
The insurer’s demands for St. Ann police also affected departments beyond this blue-collar town of about 13,000 people. The city is just one of a dozen in the St. Louis risk pool, which has required each city to overhaul its police pursuit policy.
There is no public data tracking how many police departments have made policy changes at the behest of their insurers. But the changes are widespread, affecting thousands of departments, according to interviews with more than two dozen insurance analysts, police reform experts and a review of hundreds of pages of insurance documents.
In Vallejo, Calif., the city’s insurance risk pool threatened in 2017 to end coverage because of mounting police use-of-force claims unless officials agreed to a higher deductible — a jump from $500,000 per claim to $2.5 million per claim. The city instead joined a high-risk insurance pool in California. Because of increased demand from troubled departments for its services, the California group has begun offering coverage nationwide. Vallejo officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Entire states are having to adjust to insurers’ demands. In New Mexico, the largest risk pool — which provides coverage for one-third of the state’s police officers — hired an instructor last year to travel the state and retrain officers in de-escalation skills after private insurance rates climbed by more than 60 percent. The risk pool that insures 30 of the state’s 33 sheriff departments also saw coverage shrink while rates shot up 50 percent over the past three years because of police use-of-force claims.
Across the country, allegations over police conduct are often settled by departments at taxpayers’ expense: A Post investigation in March documented more than $3.2 billion spent over the past decade to resolve nearly 40,000 claims at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments.
Concerns about insuring troubled departments have been building for years.
In 2009, a local insurance risk pool warned the 60-officer Maywood Police Department in California that it would lose its coverage if it did not enact more than a dozen changes focused on reducing violent encounters with the public. When police failed to do so, the risk pool pulled its coverage, and the department disbanded.
“When the officers had to turn over their badges and radios for the final inspection the last day, it was the most emotional thing I’ve ever experienced in my law enforcement career,” said Frank Hauptmann, who was Maywood police chief at the time. “When we did our final salute, each officer had tears streaming down their faces.”
For some police departments, insurers are refusing even to provide initial coverage unless they change their policies on a variety of matters including body cameras and chokeholds, according to industry experts.
“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and this represents a major shift,” said John Chino, a broker who secures insurance for cities and counties in six states. “They are asking lots of very detailed questions. ‘Do they use chokeholds? What does their de-escalation training look like?’ If they aren’t doing something on the list, they are required to get it if they want coverage.”
https://www.rsn.org/001/insurers-force-change-on-police-departments-long-resistant-to-it.html
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America, the beautiful?
What a wonderful world?
Hope...
Today’s Action: Switch out your household products for a healthier planet!
No matter where those in power stand on protecting the planet, it’s essential that we all do our part to reduce unnecessary waste and pollution. Many small businesses are already doing the hard work to ensure sustainable options for everyday products are on store shelves. Check out this guide and start swapping out products in your own household today!
Going zero-waste — eliminating single-use bottles and paper products and rethinking mainstream cleaning methods — is a critical step in the quest for a healthier planet. Check out this guide to creating a natural cleaning kit here.
Here are some other tips to get you started:
- Seek out earth-friendly ingredients and refillable bottles from places like EarthHero and Zero Waste Store. Opt for biodegradable paper towels, compostable parchment paper, and products that can easily be recycled.
- Make your own cleaning products. The Kitchen Chemist’s guide and Wild Minimalist have great zero-waste recipes worth trying!
- Support your local farmers and community-based agriculture. “Food forests” are great ways to help the planet and encourage sustainable eating.
- Create a waste-free bathroom with reusable menstrual products, biodegradable toothbrushes, plastic free soaps and shampoos, and non-toxic deodorant.
The average American tosses out almost five pounds of trash every day. That’s three pounds more than the global average and amounts to a whopping 268 million tons annually for our nation as a whole. If every person reading this newsletter makes even modest changes, it could make a huge difference.
The past few years have produced severe, record-breaking weather events that are only getting worse. Unprecedented destruction from tornadoes, wildfires, and flooding have displaced hundreds of thousands of working families — all while corporations and beholden legislators continue punting on existential threats to our environment.
We can’t wait around for those in power to take the first step. Do your part to create a healthier planet today!
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