What Happened Today: January 31, 2023
Biden to end COVID emergency; Morocco massacres man's best friend; The 6 year old orders the whole menu; The Anti-Gun Violence Hustle
The Big Story
The Biden administration announced on Monday that it will end the COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11. The move means a spate of federal subsidies will wind down and the federal government will no longer provide COVID-19 tests and treatments; pharmaceutical companies—which have already announced vaccine price increases three or four times higher than what they’d been charging the government—will fully take over that role. The end of the official emergency measure also means the government can once again remove people participating in the Medicaid program, which saw a record enrollment of 90 million people during the pandemic. Some 15 million people are now expected to be dropped from the government healthcare program as states begin reducing the rolls.
The administration’s announcement comes after two resolutions proposed by the House’s GOP majority sought to immediately end the emergencies while keeping alive Title 42, the health policy put in place by the Trump administration in 2020 to close down the southern border. Republicans have argued Title 42 falls under the president’s discretion and shouldn’t be pegged to the other pandemic-era emergency policies that have outlived their purpose.
The Biden administration was prevented from ending Title 42 when the Supreme Court recently issued a temporary order upholding the policy while it waits to deliver its final verdict in June.
In the Back Pages: The Anti-Gun Violence Hustle
The Rest
→ Following the discovery of classified documents by President Biden’s attorneys in his private office at the University of Pennsylvania Biden Center in Washington, D.C. in November, the FBI conducted its own sweep of Biden’s office, according to new reporting by CBS News on Tuesday. The search had not previously been disclosed by representatives of the administration or in the Jan. 14 letter by Biden’s attorney Bob Bauer that said the government had conducted “its inquiry, including taking possession of any documents and reviewing any surrounding material for further review and context.” It’s unclear as of yet if the FBI gathered any additional classified materials from the UPenn office.
→ It didn’t take long for media start-up Semafor to land a new major donor after the new venture announced earlier this month that it would buy out the roughly $10 million investment made in its company by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Readers of Semafor’s prominent newsletter “Principals” will now see that the publication is “supported by Alibaba,” the Chinese e-commerce giant that has close ties to Beijing. Alibaba also maintains investments in artificial intelligence outfits Megvii and SenseTime, both of which were blacklisted by the United States because of how their facial recognition technology was being used by China to repress and surveil Uyghur Muslims. Taking money from Alibaba is now something of a rite of passage for splashy digital news outlets with sizable readerships along the Acela corridor. Axios, Politico, and D.C.-centric Punchbowl News have all displayed sponsored content or advertisements from the Chinese platform.
→ Video of the Day:
Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon struggled under scrutiny here from ITV News Peter Smith after the government decided to temporarily suspend a policy that allowed trans women with violent records to be housed in women’s prisons.
The new policy follows the public outcry over Isla Bryson’s remandment to Cornton Vale’s women’s prison following Bryson’s conviction for the rape of two women. Identifying male at the time of the crimes, Bryson started identifying as a woman prior to sentencing.
Scotland’s justice secretary, Keith Brown, announced Bryson would then be sent to a men’s prison; he also announced a review of how the prison system houses transgender inmates, after critics said Bryson’s assignment to a women’s prison put vulnerable female prisoners at risk.
Transgender convicts make up less than half a percent of the total prison population.
→ Quote of the Day:
These monsters go around the souks poisoning cats and kittens too. They also take cats from the city, where they’re being fed and cared for, and dump them in the forest or landfills, where they slowly starve to death. It’s insane. Living here is a nightmare.
That’s Sylvia Delgado, an animal shelter volunteer, telling The Daily Beast about the ongoing massacre of stray and house-kept dogs as well as other animals while Morocco hopes to impress FIFA officials that it should host the next World Cup. After turning a blind eye to Qatar’s abusive and deadly treatment of migrant workers who built the facilities for last year’s World Cup there, the perennially corrupt FIFA will have a chance to overlook the rampant animal cruelty on Wednesday when Real Madrid and other major soccer teams take part in a FIFA tournament in Tangier and Rabat. Considered a test run before World Cup bids begin in earnest, Morocco has dispatched animal assassins with poisoned meat and darts to try to cull some of the tens of thousands of homeless dogs roaming city streets. Videos obtained by The Daily Beast show the barbaric slaying of neighborhood dogs known by name to locals, many of which are piled still half-alive into trucks of dying animals.
Read More: https://www.thedailybeast.com/brutal-dog-massacre-in-morocco-blamed-on-fifa-world-cup-bid
→ Rising interest rates and strengthening supply chains for new car production have put a halt to the used-car market’s wild ride that began during the pandemic. In 2021, semiconductors were in short supply and carmakers struggled to provide enough inventory to satisfy buyers looking to spend their stimulus money at new car dealerships. The intense demand saw used cars hit record prices before finally coming down last year, dropping 14% in 2022, with some analysts expecting a drop of another 4% in 2023. For new carmakers, meanwhile, business is booming: On Tuesday General Motors announced a $2 billion net profit for its 2022 fourth quarter.
→ Raising children is harder than expected for about two-thirds of parents who responded to a new study by Pew Research Center. For nearly 1 in every 3 mothers, it’s “been a lot harder than they expected,” a finding that jives with a growing body of research that sees mothers strained by the demands of always-on careers coupled with the responsibilities of motherhood. On average, mothers spend more time and attention on their children compared to fathers, and the tension between jobs and child rearing has catalyzed a shift in how mothers define their own identities, with 30% of mothers in the survey saying motherhood wasn’t the most important aspect to who they are as a person. “Women of earlier cohorts who were employed wouldn’t readily admit that being a mother wasn’t the most important,” Robin Simon, a professor emeritus of sociology at Wake Forest, told The New York Times. “It’s not that the parent identity is less important, but it’s an important identity among others.”
Read More: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/01/24/parenting-in-america-today/
→ Parenting might be hard, but paying the GrubHub bill after your kid spends 30 minutes firing off expensive restaurant orders from your cell phone might be the true test of a parent’s patience. A Michigan father found this out the hard way after he gave his cellphone to his 6-year-old son, hoping to occupy him with a few rounds of video games before bedtime. With his son tucked in, Keith Stonehouse realized that his son hadn’t been playing games at all but rather had been ordering nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of chili cheese fries, ice cream, jumbo shrimp, and even some salads from local restaurants that delivery drivers dropped off one after another at Stonehouse’s front door. “I was probably a 9.5 out of 10 anger while it was happening. The next day, I was at an 8, and now I’m at about a 3,” Stonehouse said. “I don’t really find it funny yet, but I can laugh with people a little bit.”
→ An Albuquerque grand jury handed down a 14-count indictment against Solomon Peña on Monday after the political hopeful who had campaigned for a seat in the New Mexico legislature was arrested on suspicion of organizing several drive-by shootings on the homes of Democratic officials. Pena is accused of paying three men to carry out the attacks, in which, luckily no one was injured. Prior to his arrest earlier this month, Peña claimed he lost because the election was rigged.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Dogs of War by Lea Lehavi
Rudolphina Menzel’s canine contributions to the British military campaign in WWII
Let’s All Celebrate Norman Mailer by David Mikics
The most swaggering and macho of Jewish writers illuminated postwar America like no one else
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Anti-Gun Violence Hustle
Philadelphia and other cities suffering from surging gun deaths are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into solutions that don’t work
By Sean Cooper
In a recent mayoral debate at St. Joseph’s University, Helen Gym, who had been an outspoken opponent of increasing Philadelphia's policing budget in 2020, called gun violence the “single greatest threat to everything that we have ever hoped for in this city.”
Gun violence is ravaging Philadelphia, just as it is Rochester, Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville, Austin, and six other major cities that suffered record breaking homicides in 2021—a crisis that shows little sign of waning. Philadelphia has something else in common with those cities: Its officials have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into anti-violence initiatives that have failed to make a dent in the surging levels of violence. It’s a very American approach to a very American problem, as politicians pump money into opaque social initiatives that provide jobs to mid-level bureaucrats while offering no meaningful relief to the ordinary victims of gun violence that they’re supposed to help.
“Everybody can get a grant, everybody gets paid,” said Jamal Johnson, a former Marine and anti-violence activist in Philadelphia. “It’s the new hustle.”
In a deeply blue city like Philadelphia, the democratic primary is the de-facto election contest. At St. Joseph's, the debate was dominated by a single issue as candidates spent two hours explaining to an auditorium of students and city residents how exactly they were going to solve the gun violence epidemic. A number of candidates, including Gym, laid out a strategy to declare a citywide state of emergency, potentially triggering a windfall of state and federal funding to help triage the violence. Money, however, has not been a problem for the leaders of Philadelphia. Last year, Pennsylvania’s governor peeled off $50 million to stem the violence in Philadelphia. And the outgoing mayor, Jim Kenney, signed off on almost a billion dollars in the city budget to beef up the nation’s fourth largest police force while also picking up the $208 million tab to support dozens of social services programs tailored to combat Philadelphia’s gun violence.
As gun violence has surged nationwide, dispensing massive sums of money to grassroots anti-violence organizations has become fashionable across all levels of government. The appeal, it seems, is that these feel-good initiatives offer something like the “thoughts and prayers” mantra invoked after mass shootings—a way for city officials to demonstrate that they’ve done something even if it has no measurable impact on the problem at hand.
After the devastating string of shootings last summer—including the killing of 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school and a mass shooting of African American shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY — congress passed its first major gun reform legislation in decades, a bill that included $250 million for community anti-violence programs. The Justice Department followed suit with another $100 million in funding for similar initiatives in September. Doubling down on their investment, the Biden administration informed State and local leaders that they could roll over unspent federal stimulus money into anti-violence programs. These huge cash infusions have increased the funding for hundreds of grassroots anti-violence organizations in cities across the country.
Just to take one example from the past few days, officials in Akron, Ohio announced another $1.5 million in funding for local anti-violence programs, the third such round of funding, bringing the total investment to $4.4 million distributed since last year. But while such aggressive funding has become commonplace, oversight is remarkably relaxed. In Jackson County, Mississippi, a 2019 audit of anti-violence spending found millions of dollars had been treated as a slush fund by local officials and program leaders who used "emergency status" designations to bypass oversight by county legislators. The anti-violence money was used to cover cell phone bills, car payments, elevator repairs, and a holiday celebration. "There continues to be a clear pattern of hubris and blatant disregard for appropriate process and best practices," county legislator Crystal Williams said after the audit was made public—a sentiment that could very well apply to any number of other municipalities where pots of anti-violence money is spent with no strings attached.
Philadelphia offers a microcosm of the techniques now being deployed by governments across the country that have decided to respond to America’s out-of-control gun violence with outsized spending on anti-violence programs.
Setting a grim new milestone in 2021, Philadelphia reached its highest homicide count on record. There are multiple reasons for the spike in violence, including the presence of the nation's largest open air drug market nestled in the north Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington (a billion dollar business, according to the attorney general), and the tidal wave of firearms now flooding the state.
In 2000, Pennsylvania counted less than 400,000 firearms sold by legitimate means. By 2022, sales had more than doubled to over a million guns purchased per year. While legal guns flipped illegally on the street remain a perennial problem for city police, the illegally manufactured firearms have become their own bailiwick, particularly the ghost guns that lack serial numbers or paperwork and which can be produced with 3-D printer schematics and make-your-own gun kits easily acquired from the darker corners of the Internet. In 2021, police seized 571 ghost guns off Philadelphia streets—more than five times what had been recovered in 2018 and 2019 combined.
The stakes could not be higher. The city, with its population of just under 1.6 million people, ended 2022 with an astronomical 2,263 shooting victims, more than 200 of them children. And yet the solution in Philly, as in other cities, is to keep money flowing into mismanaged and unproductive anti-gun initiatives.
Last November, Philadelphia’s Office of Violence Prevention released its investigation into the Community Crisis Intervention Program (CCIP), one of the mayor’s much-touted organizations that took in $5.3 million in 2021 to stem the gun violence. “Staff are reportedly 'not all on the same page' and may not have a clear understanding of CCIP's purpose,” the city’s report found, adding that "poor supervision" and "the lack of consistent and high quality training" had led some CCIP employees to believe that "the mandate CCIP has to reduce violence is unrealistic.”
Earlier last year, before the city controller, Rebecca Rhynhart, resigned to run for mayor, her office reported similar findings in an analysis of Philadelphia’s anti-violence effort as a whole. One key finding was that just 17% of the programs are designed to reduce immediate short-term threats of gun violence, while more than 4 out of 5 of the initiatives only aims to see results after three years of operation. “All of these buckshot and scattershot efforts are ineffective. And while this is common around the country, it is particularly true in Philadelphia,” David Muhammad, the leader of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, told The Philadelphia Inquirer after Rhynhart’s report was published.
Part of the problem in Philadelphia boils down to the government’s urgent need to spend money to show that it’s “doing something” despite a lack of viable programs that meet the city’s bare minimum requirements for funding. Several of the programs founded in the wake of the current mayor’s first major funding campaign against gun violence in 2020 are still waiting to launch, as they use their grants to hire staff, build offices, and pen their mission statements. When one of the mayor’s subsequent campaigns sought to spend $22 million on new grassroots programs, only $13.5 million could be handed out because so many of the organizations that applied were incapable of intervening in crisis hotspots or working directly with the population most likely to commit shootings.
The difficulty in spending money on anti-gun and anti-violence initiatives that actually work is a common predicament in areas of the country besieged by violence. In Mississippi, where the 59% increase in the rate of gun deaths between 2011 and 2020 made it the state with the second highest rate of firearm killings in the country, Governor Tate Reeves says he has millions set aside to fund a proposal to outfit teachers with guns and training to try to stem shootings in and around school grounds.
While mass shootings only account for a small fraction of overall firearm homicides, giving guns to teachers at least creates the appearance that local and state officials are trying something new to combat gun violence. Already, seven states have passed laws allowing school staff to carry guns, including Florida, where staffers complete 132 hours of firearm safety (plus 12 hours of diversity training) before being armed by the state. “The plus side to that is that old saying, ‘When seconds count, cops can sometimes be minutes away,’” Alex Coker, an active shooter response trainer, told Fox13 in Mississippi.
Yet arming educators has an uneven track record, with reports of one teacher accidentally dropping a loaded pistol while doing a cartwheel on the playground and another unintentionally firing a gun and injuring three students during a firearm safety demonstration. Over a five year period, there were more than 100 similar occurrences of school employees mishandling firearms, according to the Giffords Law Center. “The downside,” Coker noted, is that teachers could accidentally discharge their gun, or the employee goes “from being a hero to a zero, because you missed and you hit little Susie or Johnny.”
Some cities have found tangible success in reducing gun violence with Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS), a crime deterrent approach that’s used by law enforcement to target small cohorts of people, often just a few hundred individuals, who commit the bulk of violent offenses. Here, investigators pursuing gangs and others suspected of violent activities connect the targets to social service groups that present work programs and other opportunities that serve as alternatives to prison.
The social service groups tapped for GVRS are vulnerable to the same problems found in other initiatives where oversight is lax, but several cities partnering with well-vetted collaborators have seen significant decreases in the number of shootings and murders. In 2022, Baltimore endured the eighth straight year of at least 300 homicides across the city, yet in the Western District where the mayor’s office piloted a GVRS program, homicides and shootings were down 33%—results good enough for the mayor’s office to make plans to scale the program citywide. Elsewhere, in Boston, New Orleans, and Oakland, GVRS campaigns have contributed to similarly sharp declines in shootings and homicides. In Cincinnati, a similar program saw homicides drop by more than 41% amongst those groups targeted by law enforcement.
In the same mold of GVRS, Philadelphia Ceasefire was a 2-year program that Temple University researchers studied in 2017. The program reduced the number of shootings in a small section of North Philadelphia by as much as 30%. But its funding has expired since then and the city has decided to deploy its resources in other less evidenced-based efforts to limited success. In the fall, one of the city’s celebrated programs, Guns Down Gloves Up, had its $392,000 grant suspended by the city when they learned that Nashid Akil, the police captain who founded the program, along with nine other police department employees, had paid themselves $76,000—despite a grant agreement that ensured Akil would receive no payment, according to public financial records. The program is now under investigation by both the police department and the office of the inspector general, and Akil was suspended for unrelated chronic absenteeism from the police force.
With 4 months to go until the democratic primary, it’s possible that more than a few of the candidates currently in the running will decide to drop out. No doubt they’ve all heard the lamentations of outgoing mayor Jim Kenney. After two police were shot at a holiday event this past Fourth of July, Kenny told reporters he’s all but counting down the days until he’s out of office. "I’m waiting for something bad to happen all the time," Kenney said. "I’ll be happy when I’m not here, when I’m not mayor, and I can enjoy some stuff.”
It can’t make the job any easier to know that the anti-gun violence programs the city has poured money into haven’t even begun to make the city safer.
God forbid the police should arrest criminals.
Anti gun programs are no substitute for agrressive policing