07 November 21
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Mifflin, a 27-year-old Black man, kept driving. What happened next is disputed, but how it ended is certain. Officer Michael Seavers leapt out of the patrol car, drew his gun and fired 16 times at the moving car. He thought Mifflin intended to run him over, he said later.
“I had never felt the fear that I had at that moment,” Seavers, who is white, told investigators in a statement. He said he thought of what a vehicle can do “to a human body and how I would die if I didn’t react.”
The officer’s defense of killing Mifflin, who wielded neither a gun nor a knife, is one repeated over and over across the country: The vehicle was a weapon. In a New York Times investigation of car stops that left more than 400 similarly unarmed people dead over the past five years, those words were routinely used to explain why police officers had fired at drivers.
When asked in a deposition whether a man he had fatally shot in 2017 had used a weapon, an officer in Forest Park, Illinois, answered, “Other than a moving vehicle, no.”
Minutes after sheriff’s deputies near San Leandro, California, killed a shoplifting suspect and injured a passenger in an SUV in early 2019, an officer asked what weapons they had been armed with. “A vehicle,” one deputy replied.
And a lawyer for a sheriff’s deputy who shot a driver in Wichita, Kansas, in late 2019 said the motorist had used “a 4,500-pound vehicle as a weapon.”
In about 250 of the cases, the Times found that police officers had fired into vehicles that they later claimed posed such a threat. Relative to the population, Black motorists were overrepresented among those killed.
Like Mifflin, the other drivers had been pursued for nonviolent offenses, many of them minor. A seat belt ticket in Phenix City that would have cost $41. A cracked taillight in Georgia, a broken headlight in Colorado, an expired registration tag in Texas. Most motorists were killed while attempting to flee.
The country’s largest cities, from New York to Los Angeles, have barred officers from shooting at moving vehicles. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned against the practice for decades, pressuring police departments to forbid it. Police academies don’t even train recruits how to fire at a car. The risk of injuring innocent people is considered too great; the idea of stopping a car with a bullet is viewed as wishful thinking.
“Bad idea. Bad to do,” said Carmen Best, the former Seattle police chief. “If you think the vehicle is coming toward you, get yourself out of the way.”
Moving vehicles can be deadly. Nine officers have been fatally run over, pinned or dragged by drivers in vehicles approached for minor or nonviolent offenses in the past five years.
But in many instances, local police officers, state troopers and sheriff’s deputies put themselves at risk by jumping in front of moving cars, then aiming their guns at the drivers as if in a Hollywood movie, according to body-camera footage. Or they reached into cars and became entangled with motorists, then opened fire.
Often, the drivers were trying to get away from officers, edging around them, not toward them, the footage shows, and the officers weren’t in the path of the vehicle when they fired.
“You see many where bullets are in the back of the car, in the side of the car,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has researched high-risk police activities for more than 30 years. “In the high 90 percentile of cases I’ve seen, the person’s just trying to get away.”
Some officers who fatally shot motorists didn’t appear to be in any jeopardy at all, the Times review showed. In some cases the vehicle was stationary, even incapable of moving. Yet prosecutors found that the claim that officers feared for their lives or the lives of others was enough to justify all but the rarest of shootings.
Seavers faced no charges in the Mifflin case. Phenix City and state officials have declined to release police body- and dashboard-camera videos of the fatal encounter. “All it’ll do is inflame people, and people don’t understand the fine points of the law,” said the city’s lawyer, James McKoon. “And this guy was scared to death when he shot.”
Jeremy Bauer, a forensics expert in Seattle who has testified for police departments nationwide and for families of people killed, reviewed the state investigative report, witness testimony, photographs and other materials and concluded that the officer had not been in peril. It would have been impossible, he said, for Mifflin to have been headed for Seavers when the shots were fired.
“The officer just wouldn’t have been in the path of the vehicle,” Bauer said.
Enacting a Ban
Once, Phenix City was known as the Sin City of the South, and its major industry was vice: gambling, brothels and bootleg booze. In 1940, the U.S. secretary of war called it the “wickedest city in America.” Politicians and the police were on the take. After a top candidate in the Alabama attorney general’s race in 1954 pledged to clean up the city, he was gunned down.
Now, the town has a new slogan: “Positively Phenix City.” Local officials still boast of its 2007 Businessweek designation as one of the country’s most affordable suburbs — just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, Georgia — for raising a family.
The city is typical of many communities where fatal police encounters with motorists have occurred over the past five years. It’s in the South. It has fewer than 50 patrol officers. With fewer than 39,000 residents, it’s relatively small. The police department has lower training and qualification requirements than those of big cities. A GED certificate is enough.
“They’re not Navy SEALs,” said Kenneth Davis, the district attorney in Russell County, home to Phenix City. “These guys are average guys.”
The chief, Ray Smith, joined the department 32 years ago and has led it for the past 12. His two predecessors each spent decades with the department. Its use-of-force policy — governing how officers are permitted to subdue people — has not been revised to include reforms that many other departments have adopted. Smith didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. Neither the police department nor McKoon responded to detailed questions about the Times’ findings.
Law enforcement killed two unarmed Black men here in 2013: One was shot after he drove through a stop sign, led officers on a chase, fled his car and allegedly refused to come out from under a vehicle; another, naked and mentally ill, died after being stunned with a Taser 19 times and then restrained.
But there was no citywide protest, no Ferguson fallout, no George Floyd moment.
Phenix City’s use-of-force policy mentions that police officers can fire their weapons to “destroy” a threatening animal. It allows for shooting “during range practice or competitive sporting events.” While it prohibits firing from inside a moving vehicle, it doesn’t say anything about shooting at moving vehicles.
That is unusual: Out of nearly 200 departments that had such shootings and provided their policies to the Times, just 13 did not address the issue.
“It’s something that has never come up,” said Chief Darryl Laxton, in Oneida, Tennessee. He added: “This is not a very active place. A lot doesn’t go on.”
Most other departments surveyed had policies prohibiting officers from shooting at moving vehicles — but they were ambiguously worded and allowed officers to do so if they felt the need.
Critics of the practice argue that shooting at a driver is ineffective or even disastrous. “It’s like you’ve created an unguided missile,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy nonprofit. “You’ve basically lost control.”
To identify cases where police fired into vehicles, the Times reviewed data collected by The Washington Post and the research groups Mapping Police Violence and Fatal Encounters. Reporters then filed hundreds of public-records requests, analyzed more than 115 video and audio recordings, examined investigative records and interviewed dozens of experts and motorists’ families. In addition to the 250 otherwise unarmed drivers, scores of such shootings involved motorists who held weapons or were being pursued for violent crimes.
The movement to stop shooting into moving vehicles began in New York City in 1972. The police department banned the practice as part of a package of reforms after an officer shot and killed an 11-year-old boy, who had been joy riding with two friends, and wounded the driver and two passersby.
In 1972, the city’s police officers were involved in 994 shooting incidents of any kind; the next year, 665. By 2019, officers fired their guns only 52 times. And since the ban, not one on-duty officer has been killed by a vehicle fleeing a traffic stop.
The nation’s 25 largest cities have since adopted similar bans. (Some carve out exceptions for terrorists aiming vehicles into crowds.)
No one disputes that cars can be deadly: Scores of officers have been killed working accident scenes or writing tickets. But no officer in any big city that has banned the practice has been fatally run over by a vehicle he or she stopped.
The bans haven’t entirely stopped the police from fatally shooting unarmed motorists in moving vehicles not suspected in violent crimes. Still, only 11 such deaths have occurred in those departments collectively in the last five years.
Compare that with Honolulu, a city of nearly 350,000. Between 2016-20, officers there shot four unarmed motorists.
On April 1, the department tightened its rules, but with a big exception: Officers could shoot if “the vehicle’s movement poses a threat that justifies the use of deadly force.”
Four days later, officers pursued a stolen car suspected in an armed robbery and two purse snatchings. After it stopped, officers fired 15 shots, hitting the 16-year-old driver, Iremamber Sykap, in the back of the head, records show. Two officers said they shot to protect themselves and “members of the public.” One said the teenager had “rammed” his patrol car and “reversed” directly at him.
But bodycam videos show that the patrol car wasn’t rammed, the car didn’t reverse directly at the officer and officers fired when it was moving away.
The three officers were criminally charged, but a judge dismissed the charges. The officers are back on patrol.
A Stop, a Chase and 16 Bullets
Mifflin’s friends thought he would become a comedian. They called him “Kevin Hart” because he looked and behaved like the comic-actor. Mifflin pretended to find the nickname tiresome — “Lol here u go,” he’d write on Facebook — but he embraced it.
He sported a tattoo of praying hands on his left forearm; his right was inked with the name of his daughter, Shay, whom he fathered in high school. If friends got annoyed at him, he’d badger them into forgiveness. Only 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds, Mifflin acted street-wise, posing like a tough guy in photos. But that was a front; he never got into fights, and friends often mocked him for how he spent his Sunday mornings.
“He was the one who stayed in church with his grandma,” said Dontrell Grier, Mifflin’s stepbrother.
Mifflin lived in Columbus with his grandparents, a social worker and a retired small-town Georgia police chief who instructed him to always follow police orders. When Mifflin was 22, he agreed to testify in court after witnessing a mother leave a toddler alone in a car for at least 20 minutes.
He worked stocking shelves at Walmart and Piggly Wiggly. He loved cars, but he allowed more than eight years of traffic tickets for infractions like driving without a seat belt to spiral into a crisis, including a suspended driver’s license, a misdemeanor for not showing up in court, thousands of dollars in fines and potential jail time, according to court records.
Mifflin stole $265 from the Piggly Wiggly when he was 26, about the same time he lost his job there, records show. And Walmart later terminated him.
On that fateful Sunday in May 2017, he drove from Columbus to Phenix City to pick up a friend at the Frederick Douglass Homes, a public-housing complex with mostly Black residents.
The officers’ decision to pull him over appeared to be a “pretextual” stop, when the police stop drivers — often people of color — for an infraction and then look for a more serious offense, two policing experts said.
The officers seemed to be “looking for a reason to stop him because they felt that he was up to no good — he plays loud music, he doesn’t have a seat belt,” said Michael Gennaco, a former federal prosecutor who works with police departments to improve accountability and reviewed the case for the Times.
Why did Mifflin drive off? Maybe because of the suspended license. Maybe because of a story his stepbrother liked to tell: Grier had been a passenger in a car pulled over after the driver initially didn’t obey commands to stop. The Phenix City officers had aimed their weapons at him and dragged him out of the vehicle and across a parking lot.
Whatever the reason, instead of complying, Mifflin sped across a busy road. The police chased him. At that point, he was just four minutes from the Georgia line. He only needed to make it to the corner near Ed’s barbecue restaurant, take a couple of turns and cross a bridge.
But an SUV blocked his path: Djaron Green, a manager for a financial company, was about to turn into the restaurant for lunch.
So Mifflin whipped his car into Ed’s parking lot, stalling out, Green recalled. Sirens blaring, the cruiser came to a stop, pointing toward Mifflin’s rear passenger door, according to the report by the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation, which examines any officer-involved death.
Seavers jumped out of the passenger side of the patrol car. Gun drawn, he confronted Mifflin.
The driver backed his car away from the restaurant — the officer later described the vehicle’s “spinning tires” to investigators, according to the state report, obtained by the Times from Mifflin’s family. The document included some details from the unreleased body- and dashcam videos, mentioning that Mifflin’s “front right tire was turned to the right towards the area of Officer Seavers.”
The patrol car driver, Cpl. Jason Searcy, told investigators that he had begun to reverse the cruiser and didn’t see anything, but “heard several gunshots.”
Seavers did not reply to requests for comment; most of the other officers mentioned in this article declined to comment or could not be reached. Seavers told state investigators that the Mercury had come straight at him. So did an Ed’s employee who was inside the restaurant during the encounter; she did not respond to messages from the Times.
But Green, the closest witness, said the car never came near Seavers. Instead, he said, it appeared to move around him. And Bauer, the forensic expert, concluded that Seavers was never in harm’s way.
Bauer created a video reconstruction for the Times, drawing on the state report and other records. (The Times offered to let state and city officials review the video; they declined.) The officer initially fired twice; both shots entered the passenger side of the front window at a sharp angle, indicating that the car was moving past the officers, Bauer said. Both hit Mifflin. Either would have been fatal.
The vehicle kept traveling forward; Seavers turned his body and his gun to follow. Four bullets entered the passenger’s side of the car. As it passed, the patrol officer emptied his magazine, striking the back of the car multiple times, the state investigation shows.
“His life was not in danger if the vehicle was leaving,” said Isaac Lawrence, Mifflin’s grandfather, who added that he had been trained never to fire at moving vehicles. He wanted to ask the officer, “So why did you shoot him?”
Mifflin’s sedan drifted across a road and finally stopped at a used-car lot. At first, the two officers thought Mifflin had fled on foot. Instead, he was slumped over, dying from seven bullet wounds.
Creating Their Own Jeopardy
In November 2020, Deputy Jafet Santiago-Miranda of the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office searched for a stolen car in Cocoa, Florida. He spotted a similar vehicle, which pulled into a driveway, then backed out. The deputy left his cruiser and stepped in front of the car, then fired 10 times as it moved slowly forward, the dashcam video shows.
The driver, A.J. Crooms, 16, and a passenger, Sincere Pierce, 18, who had been planning to hang out with a friend, were dead. Officials later said that the vehicle was not the stolen car. (As in several other cases, guns were later found in or near the car, but they played no role in the confrontation.)
This April, Deputy Nolan Davis of the Delta County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado tried to pull over a white Honda with no license plates. The driver fled, eventually running over “stop sticks” placed by another deputy, which flattened the Honda’s tires. As the car attempted to maneuver between Davis’ patrol truck and a white truck, he stepped out of his car into the path of the Honda, bodycam footage shows. Davis moved backward as he fired eight times, even after the Honda passed him. Paige Pierce, 26, was dead.
The driver “was about to hit me,” Davis told his superior. “I had no choice, Sarge.”
Davis later said that when he stepped from his patrol truck he thought that the driver may have exited the Honda and been “possibly stopping to flee on foot,” according to a review by the district attorney.
Neither deputy lost their job or faced criminal charges.
In dozens of fatal cases over the past five years, officers reacted similarly, jumping in front of vehicles or failing to move out of the way.
Such decisions are dangerous for both motorists and officers. Over the past five years, three officers who leaned inside vehicles during stops were killed when the drivers took off. Six others were run over by vehicles they were facing down, like Amy Caprio, a Baltimore County, Maryland, police officer killed in May 2018 after responding to a call of a suspicious vehicle connected to a burglary.
“I just wanted to get away,” wrote 17-year-old Dawnta Harris to a judge after running over the officer. “From the bottom of my heart, I thought she was going to move.”
Many big cities that ban shooting into moving vehicles also say officers should not step in front of cars. But of the departments that responded to the Times, more than two-thirds — mostly outside big cities — had no such policy.
“If we have to write a policy to tell someone to not step in front of a moving vehicle, then we wouldn’t be hiring very smart people, would we?” said Capt. Mike McCoy of the Fulshear Police Department in Texas, which has no such ban. “Sometimes, common sense must take over.”
Shootings sometimes had unintended consequences. In the cases reviewed by the Times, law enforcement officers did not just hit drivers: They killed eight passengers and injured at least 17 more.
In December 2017, for instance, a part-time deputy in Grundy County, Tennessee, named Mike Holmes, kept firing after a Mustang he had pursued for reckless driving fled — hitting the side and rear of the car multiple times. One bullet hit the passenger, Shelby Comer, 20, killing her. (In an interview, Holmes, who is no longer in law enforcement, said the driver had pointed a gun at him; no gun was ever recovered.)
Holmes was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide, one of three law enforcement officers convicted after vehicle-as-weapon shootings in the past five years. “If I’ve ever had a regret in my life, it’s making that decision to pursue that Mustang that night,” he said at his sentencing hearing. “I should have discontinued the pursuit. I should have stopped.”
He was given three years’ probation.
A Pair of Settlements
The day after Cedric Mifflin was killed, Phenix City’s police chief said the encounter was traumatic not only for the man’s family “but for the entire police department.” He described the death not as a killing but as a “situation.”
“We’re going to try to find out everything that we can about how to avoid it in the future,” Smith pledged at a news conference.
But as of August, Phenix City had not changed its use-of-force policy to even mention shooting at moving vehicles. Seavers was still a patrol officer. The police department did not respond to questions about whether he had faced any discipline.
In his written statement, the officer said he fired at the rear of the vehicle because if Mifflin had just tried “to kill a police officer, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill a citizen.”
State investigators waited two days to question Seavers and did not record their interview with him, records show. Gennaco, one of the nation’s top police oversight consultants, described the state’s inquiry as “inconsistent with basic investigative protocols.”
Davis, the county’s district attorney, brought the case before a grand jury, typical in police shootings. He called a handful of witnesses and played the body- and dashcam videos. Police found no weapons or drugs in the car. The grand jury opted not to charge him.
“I honestly thought it could go either way,” Davis recalled.
After the grand jury decision, Davis suggested to Mifflin’s mother, Pochya Sanders, that she get a lawyer — advice he says he always gives in cases like this. She hunted for someone willing to sue Phenix City, she said, but most lawyers told her that Alabama juries side with the police.
Two months after the lawyer she eventually found filed a wrongful-death suit, the city offered Sanders $100,000 to settle. Her lawyer, Kenneth Shinbaum, advised her to take it, even though neither of them had seen the video footage. So she agreed. (The law firm got 50% of the settlement, a high rate for such contingency fee arrangements.)
The city then offered to show her the videos, but she decided that she couldn’t watch her son die. Now, Sanders said, she wants them to be made public. “I just need the truth,” she said.
Seavers also sued the city — a workers’ compensation claim over an “accident occurring on the job” the day of Mifflin’s death. The officer said he suffered hearing loss that day, in all likelihood because of gunfire. The city settled for $5,500.
No police or city official reached out to Mifflin’s family after he was killed, his mother said. She was the one to identify her son’s bullet-ridden body. “I carried him for nine months. I’m the first person he ever talked to, the first person he ever smelled,” she said.
She chose a baby blue coffin. At the Looking Good clothing store in downtown Columbus, she picked out a $50 blue suit for him. Blue was his color.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi initially said the House would not take up the infrastructure plan until after the broader bill had passed, but in recent days she has effectively decoupled the bills. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/NYT)
ALSO SEE: No, the Democrats' Reconciliation Bill Is Not
"Twice as Big" as the New Deal
The package focuses on “traditional” infrastructure, but some spending addresses emissions and climate resiliency.
The bill was helmed by Democrats in both chambers, but 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican representatives voted for it — a testament to the fact that infrastructure is widely recognized as a critical priority by both major political parties in the U.S. “This legislation will mean that our majority will have delivered a major victory for the American people in a bipartisan way,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in an address to the House.
Climate change, on the other hand, is still squarely in Democrats’ wheelhouse. That’s why this infrastructure bill, which Biden initially envisioned largely as a climate package, pretty much exclusively focuses on what Republicans like to call “traditional” infrastructure — bridges, tunnels, roads, and the like.
The rest of Biden’s climate agenda — half a trillion dollars in funding to address the causes and impacts of climate change — is in a “human infrastructure” bill called the Build Back Better Act. That bill is now on hold, following weeks of disagreement between moderates and progressives in both the House and Senate over how much the bill should cost and what, precisely, should go in it. On Friday, five Democratic moderates in the House released a statement committing to pass the Build Back Better Act as soon as the Congressional Budget Office releases an assessment of its costs.
Until the Build Back Better Act passes both houses of Congress — if it passes at all — the only semblance of federal climate policy isn’t so much a policy per se as a jumble of green spending buried in the infrastructure bill. Here’s a breakdown.
A portion of the climate spending in the bill falls under the category of “climate resilience,” measures that don’t necessarily bring down emissions, but will provide people and infrastructure with some measure of protection from the effects of climate change (i.e. extreme weather). The Army Corps of Engineers, the government’s Bob the Builder, will get $11.6 billion for projects related to flood control. The Federal Emergency Management Administration will get another $3.5 billion for flood mitigation and assistance. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will get $140 million for forecasting climate change and roughly half a billion additional dollars to better map and forecast inland and coastal flooding, specifically. More than $100 million will go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for relocating Indigenous communities away from climate risks like sea-level rise.
Other measures will result in fewer emissions. Aging power grids across the U.S. will get $65 billion for upgrades — thousands of miles of new transmission lines and technologies to make grids smarter and more efficient. The Energy Department’s Weatherization Assistance Program will get $3.5 billion to help more low-income households become more energy efficient. The bill invests $39 billion in modernizing public transit and $66 billion in doing the same for passenger and freight rail. Traveling via public transit and rail is more fuel efficient, and therefore more environmentally friendly, than traveling by car or plane. However, critics note that $39 billion will only put a dent in the $176 billion transit investment backlog in the U.S.
The bill also contains $5 billion to get started on a national network of electric vehicle chargers, and another $2.5 billion that can be put toward any kind of “alternative fueling infrastructure,” including natural gas, hydrogen, and propane. The bill also allocates $5 billion to replace old, polluting school buses with lower-carbon options, with half the money designated for electric school buses.
There are a few major provisions in the bill for researching and developing new carbon-cutting technologies, though not all climate advocates agree that these measures are a step in the right direction. For example, the bill includes more than $8.5 billion to start building the machinery, pipelines, and other infrastructure necessary to capture carbon dioxide emissions, both from industrial plants and directly from the air, and bury them underground. Many environmental groups disapprove of these solutions, claiming they do little more than prop up the fossil fuel industry. But proponents, including the world’s leading body of climate researchers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say it could be impossible to achieve net-zero emissions without them. The same goes for scaling up the production and use of clean hydrogen fuel. The bill allocates $8 billion to create four “clean hydrogen hubs” that will test out its use in new applications.
Some of the spending is dedicated to remediating old oil and gas infrastructure. With $4.7 billion set aside for cleaning up orphaned wells, the bill tries to make a dent in the backlog of wells that have been abandoned by oil and gas operators. When companies go under, the wells they were operating become the state, federal, or tribal government’s responsibility. These wells belch methane — a potent climate-warming gas — into the air, leak pollutants into the groundwater, and can be a safety hazard for animals and people alike. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are 2.1 million unplugged orphaned wells nationwide, and recent reporting by Grist and the Texas Observer indicate thousands more are likely to join the roster in the coming years.
The infrastructure bill sets aside a maximum of $25 million per state for cleaning them up. The bill also requires the Bureau of Land Management to set up a program to plug wells on federal lands. The plan received bipartisan support because it’s seen as both a jobs program for oil and gas workers and funding for environmental remediation. But some environmental and good government groups have raised concerns that it foists clean-up costs — which the oil and gas industry is responsible for — onto taxpayers and creates a moral hazard. Robert Schuwerk, executive director of Carbon Tracker’s North America office, warned of the “unintended consequences of the bill,” including perhaps incentivizing operators to abandon wells instead of fulfilling their environmental obligations. “What’s the message to operators who were considering plugging wells on their own dime?” he asked.
The majority of the funding in the bill goes toward the aforementioned “traditional” infrastructure: $110 billion for roads, bridges, and major infrastructure projects; $11 billion for transportation safety; $55 billion to upgrade aging water infrastructure and replace lead service lines and pipes; $25 billion to fixing America’s airports. Investing in new highways further encourages people to drive cars instead of taking public transit. And at least one of the bill’s offerings — $18 billion in loan guarantees for a $38 billion liquified natural gas export terminal in Alaska — moves the needle in exactly the wrong direction.
It’s worth remembering that the green spending in this bill was much higher before a bipartisan group of senators negotiated it from its original, $2 trillion size to a punier $1 trillion version. Total funding for electric vehicles was slashed 90 percent, funding for clean energy tax credits cut out entirely, the list goes on.
Patrick Gaspard, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, praised the passage of the infrastructure bill while calling on Congress to pass the Build Back Better Act. “While today we take a significant step forward, no thriving 21st-century economy can sustain the social and economic injustices and inefficiencies of centuries past, nor can they look the other way in the face of fundamental threats like climate change,” Gaspard said in a statement. “The only way for Congress to redress these wrongs is to send both of these bills to the president’s desk.”
Guns in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (photo: Brennan Linsley/AP)
America’s tremendous number of firearms makes it much harder to reform policing.
Police in the US, after all, are more likely to shoot and kill someone than their peers around the developed world, and disproportionately the victims are Black Americans. Meanwhile, serious crimes are often unsolved — with almost half of murders in 2020 going uncleared.
So I asked a dozen experts, focused on criminal justice, what could be done about this to build better police departments. They gave me a lot of different answers, with a consensus on more accountability, a greater focus on crime prevention and more serious offenses over minor ones, and support for non-police efforts to address root causes of crime, among other ideas.
But they consistently gave the same caveat: America’s gun problem. The US has the most civilian-owned firearms in the world, with more than one gun in circulation for every person. A bevy of research has linked greater gun ownership to more deadly violence in the US — and, America, relatedly, has the highest murder rate out of the world’s developed countries.
For police, the huge number of guns in America also means that every single call is treated as if someone involved could be armed — and that an otherwise nonviolent wellness check, mental health call, or traffic stop could turn into a deadly encounter. US law generally allows police to use force because they merely perceive a threat, and the many firearms in civilian hands give police officers a reason to believe they’re in danger.
“It’s Schrödinger’s gun: It’s always there, but it’s not there until you see it,” Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas Austin, told me. “That cost is borne by two parties: It’s borne by the public, when police make mistakes, and it’s borne by police themselves, when they’re attacked by firearms.”
Of course, other factors play a role in how US police behave. Racism, at the individual and systemic level, is a real force throughout much of American society. Racial disparities in all aspects of American life, from health to the economy, can translate to higher crime rates in minority communities, where police are subsequently deployed in greater force. And since the 1970s and ’80s, US policymaking has trended toward a “tough on crime” approach that encourages police to act very aggressively.
But guns act as a ratchet in policing. Firearms make every call to the police more risky, but also make officers and the public perceive every situation as inherently more risky. This helps explain not just how cops themselves behave but why police are involved in so many different calls to begin with, from murders to wellness checks. Armed officials ended up in charge of so many areas of society in part because the US has more guns and sees more deadly violence than its peers.
This complicates any effort to reduce the role of the police in American society. One of the more popular proposals today is to get the police out of mental health crises, replacing the cops called about people in crisis with special teams that take a softer, more public health–minded approach.
But the vast number of firearms makes it more likely these calls could escalate, endangering a member of the response team and potentially requiring armed backup. Eugene, Oregon’s vaunted CAHOOTS program, for example, has reportedly diverted 5 to 8 percent of dispatch calls away from the police by deploying unarmed, health-oriented staff to crisis situations. But as the Eugene Police Department explains, sometimes officers have to be deployed along with CAHOOTS, or even beforehand, to secure a possibly dangerous scene.
Reducing the footprint of police isn’t impossible. But the abundance of guns places limits on how far these reforms can go. To put it another way, there’s a choice that America, as a whole, and its leaders have to make: Do something about all of the guns in circulation, or limit the scope of police reform.
Guns complicate any efforts to reform police
The US has more civilian-owned firearms than any country on Earth. There are about 120 guns for every 100 people, according to 2018 data from the Small Arms Survey. Yemen, in second place, has about 53 guns per 100 people. Canada has about 35 per 100, England and Wales — where police are often unarmed — have nearly five per 100, and Japan has fewer than one per 100.
A long line of research has connected more guns to more gun violence, including police shootings. The issue is not that America has more crime or violence than other developed countries, but that guns make it much easier for an event to escalate from a merely criminal offense to a deadly encounter. For police, this reality makes them more guarded, and, potentially, more likely to shoot unnecessarily.
“Police officers are being asked to make these often very subtle decisions in situations in which they legitimately feel their life is really threatened,” Emily Owens, a University of California Irvine economist focused on crime and policing, told me. “The prevalence of firearms in the United States doesn’t help that situation, certainly.”
To be sure, other factors besides guns, from personal views to systemic issues, contribute to those subtle decisions officers make as well. There are reforms that could be tried even within the context of Americans’ massive stockpile of firearms. But guns act as a constant force in the background, drawing boundaries around how far reforms can go and how well they can work.
As one example, the abundance of guns complicates a key concept in many police reform proposals: a higher bar for getting officers involved at all.
American law enforcement respond to a lot of calls that don’t involve violence or even conflict between people. One recent study in Police Quarterly found the top three calls across nine departments were about traffic, public disturbances (like noise violations, graffiti, fireworks, and public urination), or suspicious people and activities; just 7.2 percent were about violence or involved some kind of conflict between different people. The hope is that police, as armed and possibly violent state actors who can escalate a situation themselves, could be removed from the many lower-level calls.
“If police are going to be the armed emergency first responder, what do you want these people with guns to do?” Tracey Meares, the founding director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, said. “There are people whose dogs poop in my front yard, and there’s a law against that. Do I think it’s a good idea to call a person with a gun to deal with that? No, I don’t. Just like I don’t think it’s a good idea for a person with a gun to deal with a noise complaint. I can come up with a whole bunch of other examples.”
But the number of guns among the civilian population raises the chances any given call in America will turn into violence, either by a police officer or by a civilian on the scene. In the UK or Japan, anyone responding to a mental health call — police or otherwise — can safely assume a gun won’t be present; in the US, that’s far from a sure bet.
The potential risk of a hypothetical gun is further complicated by the unpredictable nature of policing. Temple University criminologist Jerry Ratcliffe analyzed 911 calls in Philadelphia for a study in Crime Science. He found that calls for one thing can often turn into an entirely different matter — those about crime often turn out to be mental health cases or “sick assists” (such as helping a person who’s physically ill), and wellness checks sometimes turn out to be violent crimes or missing persons situations.
Even if someone thinks that they might be going into a relatively safe call, it could turn out that’s not the case. Add in the risk presented by America’s guns, and you may have a very volatile, potentially dangerous situation. “You don’t know what you’re getting,” Ratcliffe told me. “You don’t know for sure it’s a nonviolent call when you turn up.”
Most police calls are resolved safely without any serious incident. As New York City Police Department analyst John Hall noted, “just one in every 6,959 [traffic] stops results in an assault on an officer ... an officer sustaining serious injury or death from a traffic stop is even rarer.” Still, each cop can respond to multiple calls while on duty — and each call carries a roll of the dice that ends in a dangerous encounter. As Hall put it, “Over the course of a career, these stops add up.”
The officers responding to these calls are also planning for the worst, not the ideal. If there’s a decent chance that someone will encounter a gun at a call — especially if something has already happened to a colleague — officers will tend to be more guarded.
This doesn’t excuse criminal acts or horrifying, avoidable mistakes by police officers. Other factors can drive up the risk of violence at any given call, from racial profiling to insufficient housing to poor mental health systems.
But guns are the one uniquely American factor that can escalate a police call.
Addressing the root causes of crime means addressing guns
Ideally, policing in the US would look very different. Several experts pointed to the principles laid out by Sir Robert Peel, who established the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1829, emphasizing crime prevention, rather than reaction to crime, and efforts to build public support. They called for evidence-based police training, stronger accountability measures, more use of research-backed crime prevention strategies, and greater focus on violence and interpersonal conflicts, leaving lower-level offenses and incidents to unarmed officials when possible.
Some activists have gone further, with calls to “defund the police” and redirect savings to other programs that address root causes of crime, such as poverty, mental health care, and housing.
But guns are also a root cause of violence, and not addressing it makes police reform approaches less likely to succeed as intended. What happens, for instance, when staff members of an unarmed team tasked with responding to nonviolent calls get shot? Do they ask for police escorts or backup — diminishing the purpose of the reform? Do they ask to be armed — also defeating the purpose of the reform?
University of Missouri St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld said that the latter has happened before: Probation and parole officers frequently started out unarmed but over time have armed themselves because, in their view, “they were endangered by their armed clients.”
That doesn’t mean other reforms aren’t worth trying, experts said. But they are likely to be limited in scope and reach by the reality of guns in America.
In some cases, police reform may even conflict with the task of addressing root causes — making it less likely the reform can succeed on all fronts. For example, a lot of attention has gone to police’s involvement in routine traffic stops, with Philadelphia recently banning officers from stopping drivers for low-level offenses.
But it turns out traffic stops are also a big source of the guns police take off the streets. Hall’s analysis for the Manhattan Institute found 42.3 percent of the NYPD’s gun arrests in 2020 were during vehicle stops. Many of these calls can start over a broken taillight or reckless driving, only for the officer to discover an illegal firearm. And, unfortunately, it’s really hard for officers to know which stops will go in this direction; you can’t tell who’s carrying a gun simply by looking at the vehicle or driver.
It also may not be that police’s footprint in US society — and all the costs that brings — are taking up resources from better solutions, but that police are necessary because US society has failed to address root causes of crime and violence first. As University of Pennsylvania criminologist Aaron Chalfin told me, “The police are the residual claimants on all the stuff that no one else is willing or able to deal with. We put them in that position.”
In the case of guns, police are frequently needed because a country awash with firearms requires some sort of armed presence to keep people safe. Only once that abundance of guns is reduced can the police safely retreat.
Stricter gun laws could help. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that reducing access to guns can save lives. In the US, there’s particular evidence for requiring a license to purchase and own a firearm. But for political and cultural reasons, America has resisted new, serious national measures for decades, letting firearm purchases continue with few if any checks.
This has contributed to the dynamic of police acting as American society’s backup solution, which is what has saddled officers with so much responsibility to begin with. It’s not that cops wanted more duties. In my years of reporting on this issue, many officers have told me the opposite: that they were called to fill in — by lawmakers and the public — when society had already failed.
To describe these extra duties, police officers “use different terms — nonsense, bullshit, whatever they want to call it,” Sierra-Arévalo, the sociologist, said. “That’s a consistent thing: They don’t think they should be going to a lot of these things.”
America’s tremendous number of guns is at the center of all of this, exacerbating many of the country’s problems by adding a higher risk that any situation can escalate into deadly violence. Once this problem is seen, it’s hard to unsee; it makes it clear why police are responding to so much of the “nonsense” and “bullshit” in the first place.
Doing something about the guns may be the only hope of truly altering that reality — and allowing more police reform.
A 2011 lawsuit alleging the FBI targeted people based on their religion was initially dismissed after the US government said proceeding would harm national security. (photo: Andrew Chung/Reuters)
Lawyers will argue FBI can not cite national security risk to avoid lawsuit alleging targeting based on religion.
Plaintiffs in the case, which stems from a lawsuit originally filed in 2011, say the US government has for years used national security to dodge accountability. That has deprived them of a chance to present in court a mountain of evidence they say shows the FBI pursued a “dragnet” surveillance campaign against the Muslim community in Southern California that included secret audio and video recording and was motivated solely by the religion of those monitored.
That surveillance came amid a slew of early 2000s US government tactics targeting Muslims in the name of national security that continue to cast a long shadow, even as they remain shrouded in secrecy.
“We’ve been feeling violated for the past 15 years now, at least since the time that I found out what the FBI was doing,” said Sheikh Yassir Fazaga, who was an imam at the Orange County Islamic Foundation in Mission Viejo, California, when the agency sent a paid informant posing as a convert to monitor his mosque and others in the area beginning in 2006.
The religious leader is a plaintiff in the case, Fazaga v FBI, along with Ali Uddin Malik and Yasser Abdelrahim, both congregants at the Islamic Center of Irvine in Irvine, California.
A lower court in 2012 dismissed the trio’s initial lawsuit, ruling in favour of the FBI’s position that, in part, argued that letting it proceed would pose a national security risk. A federal appeals court later sided with Fazaga, Malik and Abdelrahim, saying the lawsuit should proceed, advancing the case to the US’s top court.
‘Sorry, but you have to just trust us’
For a decade spanning three presidential administrations, the government’s line of defence to the lawsuit has remained the same, said Ahilan Arulanantham, the faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, who will argue on behalf of Fazaga, Malik and Abdelrahim at the Supreme Court on Monday.
“The government’s position has been, ‘We don’t (monitor) people solely because of their religion’,” he said. “Anything more that we tell you at all would risk national security and therefore can’t be shared with anyone, even the court in secret.
“The government’s position amounts to: ‘Sorry, but you have to just trust us’,” he said.
The FBI, to date, has been shielded from offering a full account of its surveillance activities in Southern California, but has confirmed in unrelated court proceedings that Craig Monteilh was working as an informant for the agency at several mosques in Orange County in 2006 and 2007.
The agency has maintained, according to court documents, that “it did not engage in unconstitutional and unlawful practices” and that it “undertook reasonably measured investigatory actions in response to credible evidence of potential terrorist activity”.
Other details have come from accounts from congregants and community members who came into contact with Monteilh, as well as Monteilh’s own lengthy accounts of his work as an informant.
The 2011 lawsuit says that Monteilh, at the behest of his FBI handlers, recorded hours of video and audio inside mosques, at religious meetings, inside people’s homes, casting a wide and often indiscriminate net by infiltrating diverse groups at the various Islamic institutions.
The infiltration was particularly stinging for Fazaga, who as a prominent leader had just months earlier moderated a community meeting with the head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, Stephen Tidwell. The official had assured those gathered that the agency would not send secret monitors into the community.
“The potential for abuse is just so unbelievably great,” Fazaga said of the FBI’s broad national security claims.
“Imagine putting recording devices in the confessional in a Catholic church? Imagine that they can do this in a place that is meant to be safe … people trust their religious leaders, people come and share their most intimate details with us,” he told Al Jazeera.
“For the government to have access to these types of setting for no good reason,” he added, “it’s very dangerous and very damaging.”
The 2011 lawsuit notes that no convictions came from Monteilh’s monitoring.
However, several congregants took it upon themselves to report Monteilh – and his persistent fixation on violence – to authorities.
As more details of the FBI’s surveillance came to light, particularly when Monteilh went public in 2009, distrust towards law enforcement, and within the Muslim community in Orange County, became pervasive, Fazaga said.
Without accountability from the government, that environment remains largely unchanged, he said.
“The most important element in any healthy human relationship is trust. And when you erode that trust, you literally cannot have a healthy community,” he said.
“People start doubting. They start suspecting and then they start distancing themselves.”
He added that non-Muslims converts have faced particular wariness in the years since.
“Historically speaking, this has always been a moment that the Muslim community celebrates,” he said. “Now … I’d be lying if I tell you people aren’t questioning: Is this for real? is this for show? Is this the next informant in our community?”
‘Symbolically and doctrinally’
Lawyer Arulanantham said the Supreme Court proceedings could be impactful both “symbolically and doctrinally”.
“There’s been very little accountability for the long history of discrimination against Muslim Americans since 9/11, and this case affords them the rare opportunity for that,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Doctrinally,” he added, “for the courts to say that there is a mechanism by which the government can be held to account when it engages in discrimination on the basis of religion, even in national security contexts, would be very important.”
Monday’s arguments will centre on the government’s state secrets privileges, a doctrine stretching back to the early 1800s that has been refined in subsequent court rulings to regulate when national security can be cited to withhold information.
The arguments will also likely focus on the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which regulates domestic surveillance. The law was passed in the wake of revelations of government surveillance of civil rights leaders and anti-war protesters.
Fazaga, who is now an imam at the Memphis Islamic Center in Mississippi, said a ruling in favour of the FBI’s national security claims “will cement the belief that Muslims in the US are second-class citizens”.
He said he is still regularly approached by other Muslims from across the country who share their own experiences with the FBI’s surveillance practices in the two decades since 9/11.
Still, he agreed the case goes far beyond one faith group and urged the wider US population to pay attention.
“Muslim communities have immediately taken on the burden of this,” he said.
“But ultimately the good that that comes out of it is not just for the Muslim community. It’s for all citizens.”
Fazaga, Malik and Abdelrahim are also being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the law firm of Hadsell Stormer Renick and Dai.
A decision in the case is expected some time before the end of the current Supreme Court term, which ends in June 2022.
Pro-choice demonstrators protest outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on November 1, 2021. (photo: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu/Getty Images)
To understand how abortion law in the United States got to this point, you have to turn the clock back to 2010.
To understand how the United States got to this point, you have to turn the clock back to 2010, when Republicans, energized by President Barack Obama’s 2008 election, launched a massively successful effort to win seats in state legislatures. Their victory had dire consequences for abortion rights and access: Of the thousand-plus state-level abortion restrictions enacted since Roe’s passage, nearly half came into being in the last decade. And although anti-abortion activists spent the first half of the 2010s pursuing incremental laws that aimed to chip away at Roe, the push for outright abortion bans hit a fever pitch during the latter half of the Trump administration—and only sped up once President Joe Biden took office.
Since Ohio introduced the first six-week abortion ban back in 2011, nine of the nation’s reddest states have passed their own version of the restrictive bill. These “heartbeat bills,” as anti-abortion activists call them, outlaw abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy based on the notion that cardiac activity can be detected that early. (At that point in pregnancy, an embryo does not have a fully developed heart.) Since many people women don’t know that they’re pregnant within those first six weeks, these bans essentially function as total bans on abortions—especially because these bills frequently lack exceptions for rape or incest.
Until now, court challenges have put these six-week bans on ice, but that’s part of anti-abortion activists’ plan. Each outright abortion ban is designed to hand the conservative-leaning Supreme Court a chance to overturn Roe. In December, the Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a bill that bans almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy—and before fetal viability. Under current abortion jurisprudence, states are blocked from outlawing abortion that early into pregnancy.
However, on Sept. 1, Texas enacted SB 8, a six-week ban that, unlike its predecessors, actually managed to go into effect. The Supreme Court initially declined to block the ban but has since heard arguments in the case.
How Does The Texas Abortion Law Work?
Unlike past six-week bans, the Texas abortion ban is not enforced by the state government but by ordinary people. Individuals may sue anyone who “aids or abets” an illegal abortion—including, potentially, an Uber driver for taking a patient to an abortion clinic. A successful lawsuit nets $10,000 in damages.
Ahead of the Texas ban’s enforcement, patients and providers desperately raced against the clock to provide abortions that would soon become illegal. One Texas doctor even performed 67 abortions in the hours before the ban took effect. But days later, abortion clinics saw a dramatic drop in their ability to help patients, as only a fraction qualified for abortions under the stringent law. Patients are now seeking abortions across state lines—and even international borders, since getting an abortion in Mexico is now easier than in Texas.
This citizen-enforced law has spurred anti-abortion vigilantes to spread the word on how to enforce it. Supporters of the law have even created whistleblower websites that are meant to act as tip lines for possible violators (and abortion rights proponents have struck back with Shrek porn). Even Reddit had a short-lived abortion bounty hunter community that sought to enrich themselves with the reward money, although the community was banned for breaking the website’s rules about harassment.
Why Does the Texas Ban Threaten Roe v. Wade?
The Texas ban’s unique form of enforcement has bedeviled attempts to strike it down. When the Supreme Court declined to stop the ban, the justices didn’t rule on the law’s constitutionality but instead wrote that the case presented “complex and novel procedural questions” that had not yet been addressed. Lawmakers in other red states have now suggested that they are interested in adopting a version of the Texas ban.
But the Supreme Court’s original refusal to act doesn’t mean that the court battle over the law is over. The Justice Department sued over the ban, leading a U.S. district judge to temporarily freeze it. A federal appeals court soon lifted that freeze, putting the ban back into effect, and ordered a round of oral arguments over the law. The Justice Department has since asked the Supreme Court to once again weigh in, and, in early November, the justices heard oral arguments in two challenges to the Texas ban. In the November oral arguments, however, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett suggested that they had some skepticism about the Texas law.
But the fact that the Supreme Court at first chose not to act—and its willingness to consider a separate case that could overturn Roe—don’t bode well for the future of abortion rights in the United States. While state-level Republicans worked to pass abortion restrictions, President Donald Trump appointed three conservative justices to the bench: Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. (Barrett’s personal lack of support for abortion rights is particularly well-documented.) All three justices supported letting the Texas ban take effect, alongside Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
What is the Mississippi abortion law?
In March 2018, Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law a 15-week abortion ban. Like the Texas ban, the Mississippi law contained no exceptions for incest or rape and flies in the face of abortion jurisprudence that protects abortion ahead of fetal viability. (That benchmark is usually pegged at around 24 weeks of pregnancy.) Unlike the Texas ban, a federal judge has blocked the Mississippi law from taking effect, thanks to a lawsuit brought by the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the last abortion clinic left standing in Mississippi.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on Dec. 1. With six conservative justices, the case could very well mark the end of Roe.
What Is Roe v. Wade?
In 1970, a pregnant woman named Norma McCorvey filed a lawsuit against Henry Wade, then the Dallas County district attorney, under the pseudonym Jane Roe. McCorvey and her attorneys argued that Texas law, which at the time prohibited abortions unless they were necessary to save the life of the mother, were unconstitutional.
Eventually, the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which, in January 1973, ruled in favor of McCorvey. The ruling came too late for McCorvey: By that time, she already had her child and put her up for adoption. McCorvey would go onto to act as both a pro- and anti-abortion advocate, although shortly before her death she confessed that she’d only joined the anti-abortion movement because they paid her well.
In Roe, the Supreme Court found the right to abortion was embedded in the right to privacy, which is not specifically listed in the Constitution but can be constructed through a few different legal maneuvers. The right to privacy described in Roe has its roots in other landmark cases—most notably, the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, which expanded access to birth control. In other words, if Roe goes, it could unwind protections for other rights.
Subsequent cases have refined and rewritten Roe’s findings, but the case now acts as a kind of ground-level protection for abortion access. Without it, states can be free to do as they please.
Will the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade?
The Supreme Court will have a chance to weigh this very question in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. And it’s not looking particularly rosy for abortion rights supporters right now.
Although the abortion rights movement triumphed at the Supreme Court in a 2019 case, the justices have now agreed to evaluate whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” At least four justices must agree to take up a case in order for the Supreme Court to do so—which means that at least four justices are interested in revisiting what’s widely believed to be Roe’s core holding.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on Dobbs by next summer. Meanwhile, Democrats in the House have passed the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would codify Roe into federal law. The bill, however, is likely doomed in the gridlocked Senate.
A handout picture showing damage to the prime minster's residence after a failed assassination attempt on Saturday night. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Mustafa al-Kadhimi was unhurt when drone targeted his residence inside the fortified Green Zone, says government
In a statement released early on Sunday, the government said the drone tried to hit al-Kadhimi’s home in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses foreign embassies and government offices. Residents of Baghdad heard an explosion followed by gunfire in the area.
Two Iraqi officials told the Associated Press that seven of his security guards were injured in the attack. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to give official statements.
“I am fine and among my people. Thank God,” the prime minister tweeted shortly after the attack. He called for calm and restraint, “for the sake of Iraq”.
He later appeared on Iraqi television, seated behind a desk in a white shirt, looking calm and composed. “Cowardly rocket and drone attacks don’t build homelands and don’t build a future,” he said.
A security statement released by state-run media said the failed assassination attempt was with “a booby-trapped drone that tried to target his residence in the Green Zone”. It added that he was not harmed and was in good health.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, which the US condemned as terrorism.
“We are relieved to learn the prime minister was unharmed. This apparent act of terrorism, which we strongly condemn, was directed at the heart of the Iraqi state,” state department spokesperson Ned Price said.
“We are in close touch with the Iraqi security forces charged with upholding Iraq’s sovereignty and independence and have offered our assistance as they investigate this attack.”
A spokesman for the commander in chief of the Iraqi armed forces said the security situation was stable inside the Green Zone on Sunday.
Images published by the state news agency INA showed damage to some parts of the prime minister’s residence and a damaged SUV vehicle parked in the garage.
Remains of a small explosive-laden drone used in the attack were retrieved by security forces to be investigated, a security official with knowledge of the attack told Reuters.
“It’s premature now to say who carried out the attack,” said the security official on condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to comment on security details.
“We’re checking our intelligence reports and waiting for initial investigation results to point the finger at perpetrators.”
Pro-Iran Shia militias supporters have been camped outside the Green Zone for nearly a month after they rejected the results of Iraq’s parliamentary elections, in which they were the biggest losers.
Protests turned deadly on Friday when the demonstrators marched towards the Green Zone and there was an exchange of fire in which one protester was killed and dozens of security forces were injured.
Al-Khadimi ordered an investigation to determine what sparked the clashes and who violated orders not to open fire. Some militia leaders have openly blamed al-Kadhimi for Friday’s clashes and the protester’s death.
Al-Kadhimi, 54, was Iraq’s former intelligence chief before becoming prime minister in May last year. He is considered by the militias to be close to the US, and has tried to find a balance between Iraq’s alliances with the US and Iran.
Prior to the elections, he hosted several rounds of talks between regional foes Iran and Saudi Arabia in Baghdad in a bid to ease regional tensions.
The US, the UN security council and others have praised the 10 October election, which was mostly violence-free and without major technical glitches.
After the vote, militia supporters had pitched tents near the Green Zone, rejecting the election results and threatening violence unless their demands for a recount were met.
The unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud have cast a shadow over the vote, while the standoff with the militia supporters has also increased tensions among rival Shia factions.
The election was held months ahead of schedule in response to mass protests in late 2019, which saw tens of thousands in Baghdad and predominantly Shia southern provinces rally against endemic corruption, poor services and unemployment.
They also protested against the heavy-handed interference of neighbouring Iran in Iraq’s affairs through Iran-backed militias.
The militias have lost popularity since the 2018 vote, when they made big election gains. Many Iraqis hold them responsible for suppressing the 2019 protests, and for challenging the state’s authority.
The biggest gains in this year’s poll were made by influential Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who won the largest number of parliament seats, 73 out of 329. While he maintains good relations with Iran, al-Sadr publicly opposes external interference in Iraq’s affairs.
The protests appeared to be aimed at pressuring al-Sadr to ensure that Iran-aligned factions are part of the next Cabinet. As the winner, al-Sadr’s bloc will seek coalition partners and name the prime minister.
Michael Badback and his mother, Thelma Whiskers, stand next to the barbed wire fence at the White Mesa Mill in southeastern Utah. (photo: Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News)
Utah says the White Mesa Mill isn’t contaminating groundwater, but its neighbor, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, disagrees.
Badback lives in White Mesa, Utah, on part of the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. The smell comes from her neighbor, the White Mesa Mill, the last conventional uranium mill in the United States. When the mill’s tall smokestacks begin to billow and the winds roll off the blue Abajo Mountains, the stench floats five miles south to White Mesa. Badback, like most residents, can smell it from her doorstep.
Badback sat on a gray couch, hugging a pillow to her chest, her long black hair pulled into a loose ponytail. A retired health representative for the tribe, she has devoted her life to closing the mill. Badback’s mother, Ute Mountain Ute elder Thelma Whiskers, sat next to her, switching between English and the Ute language whenever her great-grandchildren peered through the doorway or came into the room.
“A lot of people don’t understand what we go through here in our community,” Badback said. “We want the mill to close. We want them to clean it up.”
Badback sounds frustrated and fatigued; at 48, she barely remembers life without the mill. Over the past 40 years, the construction of the mill demolished archaeological and burial sites important to the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and depleted the tribe’s traditional hunting grounds, destroying places where people once gathered plants for basketry and medicine. Radioactive waste has been spilled along the main highway from trucks hauling material from Wyoming to White Mesa for processing. The children can no longer play outside because of the stench and the fear of what might be causing it.
The mill sits in the heart of San Juan County, a few miles east of the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, with Canyonlands National Park to the north and Monument Valley to the southeast. It opened in 1980 to process uranium ore from the Colorado Plateau into yellowcake, a concentrated powder used in energy production and nuclear weapons. Most uranium mines closed in the last half-century. But White Mesa not only remains open, it has become a destination for radioactive material from around the world. Now, its owners want to accept waste from the Northern European country of Estonia, nearly 5,000 miles away.
Underneath the mill lies the shallow Burro Canyon aquifer, which feeds the sacred freshwater springs the tribe relies on. A layer of sandstone and shale separates it from the deeper Navajo Sandstone aquifer, White Mesa’s primary source of drinking water. The Navajo Sandstone aquifer empties into the San Juan River, one of the Colorado River’s main tributaries. Data from Energy Fuels Resources, the Colorado-based company that owns the mill, shows that groundwater from the Burro Canyon aquifer contains multiple contaminants — and that it’s rapidly getting worse. The company blames naturally occurring contaminants or previous industries, even as the contamination keeps growing.
Now, both the tribe and conservationists fear that if Energy Fuels Resources is allowed to import Estonia’s waste, it will not only further endanger the tribe, it will encourage more radioactive byproducts to be imported, prolonging the life of the mill and its impacts on land, air, water and the community’s cultural heritage. “At which point will somebody say, ‘Enough’?” Peter Ortego, the tribe’s general council spokesperson, said to me. “The tribe has already said, ‘Enough,’ and we wish other people would join us.”
AS TENSE AND HUMID summer monsoon clouds formed over the mesa, Michael Badback, Yolanda’s brother, drove me around in his nephew’s black Ram truck. We started on the mill’s west side and drove north along a dirt road, following the mill’s boundaries. Badback pointed out a small cluster of buildings and warehouses. Tribal members used to hunt deer and rabbits in this area, he said, and gather the once-lush sagebrush for medicinal tea.
“The sagebrush used to look like turquoise,” Badback said. “And now, you see them, and they’re all dead.”
Badback no longer hunts here. Only a 4-foot-tall barbed wire fence, marked with radioactive warning signs but riven by large gaps, separates the mill from the hunting grounds. The mesa’s wildlife has easy access to the mill’s five “tailings cells” — pits that hold a poisonous soup of radioactive slurry and toxic waste, leftovers from the uranium-milling process.
Today, the tailings cells cover about 290 acres — the equivalent of 382 football fields. When the mill was first built in 1980, three cells were constructed, with only a single layer of lining to separate the toxic waste from the ground and no leak-detection systems. If it were built today, all the cells would require two layers of liners and a system to detect any leakage.
Badback told me that hunters in the community said they’d seen deer hop the fence and drink from the tailings ponds; some animals have been found with green-colored meat. Now, tribal members travel great distances to hunt and collect herbs safely.
This wasn’t always the case. For thousands of years, Badbacks’ ancestors called the Four Corners region home. Yolanda and Michael’s mother, like the generations before her, gathered willows for weaving baskets, sagebrush for tea and sumac berries on the open mesas and desert ridges. People hunted deer and elk, and grew squash, corn and beans. The sandstone landscape is dotted with archaeological sites, including kivas, pit houses, petroglyphs and burials.
Life changed dramatically for the Ute Mountain Ute and other Four Corners tribes — the Hopi, Diné, Ute and Pueblo of Zuni — when the Spanish colonized the area, and were eventually followed by Mormon settlers. Through a series of land cessions and treaties in the late 1800s, the U.S. government drastically reduced the tribe’s ancestral land claims and forced most of its members to move to a reservation in western Colorado, though a few obtained small allotments in San Juan County, Utah. Today, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe is split between two locations: About 2,000 people live in Towaoc, Colorado, the tribe’s headquarters, while a smaller community of about 300 live in White Mesa.
The lands the U.S. government chose as reservation sites were often remote and rugged, regarded as undesirable by white settlers. But as Stephanie Malin, an associate professor of sociology at Colorado State University and the author of The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice, explained, many of those “undesirable” lands later turned out to be rich in coal, natural gas and, especially, uranium. Suddenly, extractive industries were interested. Uranium mills and mines were built near or on tribal lands; the Jackpile-Paguate Uranium Mine on Laguna Pueblo land, for example, was once one of the largest open-pit uranium mines in the world.
Mining and milling increased rapidly after World War II, once the Cold War began, mostly on the Colorado Plateau, which was home to some of the nation’s largest uranium deposits. Until 1971, the federal government was the sole purchaser of uranium ore in the U.S., and it relied heavily on Indigenous — especially Navajo — labor for mining.
Over 90% of all milling in the U.S. occurred on or just outside reservation boundaries. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are more than 500 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation alone. All that mining has compromised the health of the Southwest’s Indigenous people.
European experience earlier in the century had shown that exposure to uranium had potentially fatal health effects. But the U.S. industry was loosely regulated, and the few regulations that existed were largely unenforced. Little protection was provided for miners.
Today, federal and state governments have regulations concerning environmental protection, worker health and safety, and treatment of contaminated sites. But the regulations lack uniformity, and the responsibility for enforcement is spread across multiple agencies. In 1974, the U.S. government created an independent agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), to regulate nuclear power plants and other uses of nuclear materials.
The White Mesa Mill opened in 1980 under NRC regulation. An environmental assessment done at the time estimated its lifespan at 15 years, leading the tribe and many other locals to believe it would be a relatively short-lived enterprise, and that reclamation would begin shortly after operation ceased. A few years later, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control took over regulatory oversight from the NRC.
Instead of closing after 15 years, the mill started to process “alternate feed” — uranium-laden waste from contaminated sites across the country — in the early ’90s, including from the Oklahoma Sequoyah Fuels plant near Gore, Oklahoma. The White Mesa Mill processed tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste from other mills for small amounts of uranium and stored the resulting waste in its tailings ponds, a practice that continues today.
According to Kamran Zafar, former staff attorney for the environmental nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust, this practice exploits a regulatory framework that classifies radioactive byproducts as “alternate feed” rather than conventional uranium ore. Because radioactive byproducts are classified this way, the mill can receive and process them despite the fact that it has to store the leftover materials. More than 99.73% of the shipped material from Estonia will be stored at White Mesa.
“(Energy Fuels Resources) say they’re recycling the alternate feed, which basically means they’re getting out the trace amounts of uranium that are left that other disposal facilities couldn’t,” Zafar told me. “But really what they’re doing is they’re getting paid to dispose of the vast majority of that waste at the White Mesa Mill permanently. And because they’re not a properly licensed radioactive waste facility, they can do it at much cheaper cost than other facilities could.”
Curtis Moore, Energy Fuels Resources’ vice president of marketing, disagrees. “We get license amendments pursuant to state and federal law — it’s not some obscure loophole,” he said.
The company wants to import 2,000 drums — 615 metric tons — of radioactive waste from Estonia, which has no licensed facilities capable of processing its waste. First, however, the company had to amend its radioactive material license. Utah’s Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control received a huge volume of public comments once people learned about it — nearly 12,000 of them opposed, compared to only around 300 in support. Still, it granted Energy Fuels Resources’ request this summer.
Both the tribe and environmental watchdogs are worried about the quality and longevity of the older tailings cells, concerned that they’ll leak into the aquifers below — if they haven’t already.
“These three older cells have been there for 40 years, and they were not designed to be there for 40 years,” Scott Clow, the environmental programs director for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, told me. Clow believes, “It’s not whether they leak, it’s how much they leak.”
Energy Fuels Resources, which bought the mill in 2012, has already reported that one of its cells emitted more radon into the air than allowed in 2012 and 2013 according to court records. The EPA identifies radon as the number one cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers. In 2014, the Grand Canyon Trust sued Energy Fuels Resources in Utah District Court, alleging that the company was violating the Clean Air Act. After three years of litigation, the judge ruled in the company’s favor. Three state regulators filed declarations in support of the company.
No one was surprised; Energy Fuels Resources is an influential power among government agencies and top officials. In 2017, a Washington Post investigation revealed that the company had urged the Trump administration to shrink Bears Ears National Monument, saying this would allow the industry access to uranium deposits. In a letter to the Interior Department, Mark Chalmers, the company’s president and CEO, said that the monument could impact future mill operations. “There are also many other known uranium and vanadium deposits located within the (original boundaries) that could provide valuable energy and mineral resources in the future,” he wrote.
ALDEAN BETCHUM, a Ute Mountain Ute elder, professional flute player and Bear Dance chief, has noticed the changes to the land. His great-grandfather and the generations before him were sheepherders in and around the greater Bears Ears region. As a young boy, Ketchum was responsible for his grandfather’s sheep. Every summer, he rose early to corral about a hundred animals, guiding them north toward Elk Ridge along Cottonwood Wash, an important tributary to the San Juan River, leading them toward the freshwater springs.
“That’s how my people survive,” Ketchum said. “Over the years and even through the Depression, we were out there, surviving and living off of the land.”
But now, vegetation near the mill is drier than it used to be, the springs are at risk of contamination and the water that flows from the pipes of homes like Ketchum’s tastes metallic. “There was a time when we lived and our water that we had here was so delicious and so sweet, you’d drink it all day,” Ketchum said. Today, like most locals, Ketchum either boils his water before drinking it or travels great distances to purchase water in bulk.
Groundwater monitoring on the mill’s property has increased since the late ’90s, but public data collected from Energy Fuel Resources’ monitoring wells and processed by tribal scientists reveal that contamination has gradually worsened. Starting in the late ’90s, some plumes — a release or movement of contaminants in the groundwater — were detected beneath the mill. One of them was a chloroform plume, which was identified as laboratory waste left over from previous activity. However, a nitrate/chloride plume was also identified, and data has shown the groundwater is contaminated with multiple heavy metals, including uranium.
All the while, groundwater is becoming more acidic. Normal drinking water possesses a pH level between 6.5-8.5, but data from the tailings cells shows pH levels between 1-3, with one of the oldest cells possessing a pH level less than 1 as recently as 2020. Significant lowering of pH has been seen in groundwater plumes associated with other contaminated uranium mill sites, such as the Bear Creek uranium mill in Wyoming.“We’ve gone from no data indicating groundwater contamination, to some data indicating groundwater contamination, to a lot of data indicating groundwater contamination,” Clow, the tribe’s environmental programs director, told me.
Energy Fuels Resources contends that the pollution is related to changes in the geochemistry or previous industrial activities that occurred on the property. “There’s no evidence that there’s any leaking or anything happening at those sites that I’m aware of, so (we’re) certainly not contaminating the groundwater of the Utes or whatever,” Moore, the company’s vice president of marketing, told me. “We’re in full compliance with all laws and regulations, so you know, there’s been no adverse environmental or health impacts from the mill that we’re aware of.”
The state says that there’s no proof that any cells have leaked. “You can have natural rising trends, a decrease in trends that could basically be from changes in concentration of pH in the wells, but also could just be, you know, some years you have more water and less water,” Phil Goble, uranium mills and radioactive materials manager at the Utah Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control, said. “Depending on what the elevation is for the groundwater, it can change some position with concentrations that naturally happen.”
Meanwhile, the state — at Energy Fuels Resources’ request — continues to move the goalposts for acceptable contamination. When any of the several monitoring wells exceeds the levels allowed, the company is required to determine the source of the contamination and report it to the state. Since Energy Fuels Resources bought the White Mesa Mill, it has requested modifications to groundwater compliance levels, often increasing the level permitted, at least 27 times in the past nine years. The Utah Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control has granted all its requests, occasionally asking for more data analysis. “If the licensee can meet the criteria that’s outlined in federal and state law, we’re obligated to say yes, we can’t legally say no,” Goble said.
In a letter to the Utah Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control in 2020, the Ute Mountain Ute raised concerns about the contamination in several wells on the mill’s property. The tribe pointed out seven instances near the end of 2019, when wells exceeded contamination levels. The tribe urged the state to investigate and “identify and address the root causes of the contamination, rather than artificially relaxing groundwater contaminant levels (GWCLs) to excuse noncompliant data and allow further degradation of water quality.”
The state says it takes the tribe’s concerns seriously. However, it sides with Energy Fuels Resources. “We understand the concerns of Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, but based off of what we’ve seen over the past 16, 17 years of regulating the White Mesa Mill after receiving it from the NRC, we have no evidence to support any kind of assertions the mill is harmful to human health or the tribe,” Goble said. “We can definitely understand their concerns, but we haven’t seen anything that says the mill is harming the members of the tribe.”
Even if the contaminants were naturally occurring and the mill was not contributing to groundwater pollution, the state should be monitoring it closely, Colin Larrick, the tribe’s water quality program manager, said. “We’ve been telling the state that if they really believe that this formation is naturally acidifying and releasing contaminants to toxic levels … that’s a big deal, and they should be studying this and alerting people,” he said. “But there’s none of that.”
On a hot morning in July, Larrick showed me some of the tribe’s monitoring wells. We drove north along Highway 191 and turned west onto a gravel road about a mile south of the mill. He stopped about a hundred feet from the highway and pointed to a 2-foot-high square yellow structure. It’s small and easily overlooked, but its importance is sizable: It is the tribe’s latest monitoring well, placed on Bureau of Land Management land as close as possible to the mill’s boundaries. The well’s location will enable the tribe to better track any changes to the groundwater closer to the reservation, and to compare that data to the information the mill is obtaining from its own wells.
As we drove on, the gravel road turned to rust-colored dirt, dampened by yesterday’s monsoon rains. As we descended from the flat mesa, junipers began to appear in greater numbers, cottonwood trees emerged, and the vegetation glowed a brighter green, indicating that water was nearby. Below the mesa, a spring brought freshwater to the desert, not in a gushing surge, but in a slow and steady trickle. Small droplets fell from the porous rock above the spring, and a sliver of a stream, about the width of a pencil, flowed out of the rock into the ravine. Steep cliffs rose above it. At the top, there were remnants of Puebloan structures: The water had clearly been relied on for thousands of years.
This freshwater spring is important to the Ute Mountain Ute, who use it for drinking water, sweat lodges and ceremonial purposes. This spring and others in the area have maintained a steady flow and good quality water for decades, but Larrick and the tribe worry that contamination from the mill could soon change that. In the meantime, Larrick said, “These are the standards that we aim to protect these resources; that’s the type of use we expect springs to support into the future.”
In addition to amending its license, Energy Fuels Resources plans to build two more tailings cells. The Utah Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control has yet to grant the company permission to expand, but the possibility concerns the Ute Mountain Ute. The mill is in the White Mesa archaeological district, which is home to hundreds of Ancestral Puebloan and sacred archaeological sites. Many of them are hard to distinguish owing to erosion caused by weather, cattle and farming.
When the mill was first proposed in the late ’70s, its original owners had to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act. Archaeologists had to survey the property, identify any cultural sites and suggest mitigation strategies to reduce the impacts of construction. They discovered large pit houses and kivas, storage structures, burial sites, fire pits, middens and numerous artifacts. Despite the survey, however, officials with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe say they were not consulted, and most of the sites were destroyed during construction. Photos show bulldozers destroying what appears to be a kiva. “It’s a terrible photograph, and it just brings tears to your eyes,” Ortego, spokesman for the tribe’s general council, told me.
The tribe fears that if Energy Fuels Resources is allowed to construct new cells, more cultural sites will be lost. The company has continued to excavate on the property, but according to Terry Knight, the tribe’s historic preservation officer, the tribe has rarely been notified of any archaeological findings.
According to a Cultural Resources Easement Agreement from 1985, the BLM was aware of the archaeological sites when it first transferred the land to Energy Fuels Resources’ predecessors. The BLM’s Moab District was supposed to inspect them every three years, at least, in order to monitor and mitigate any damage. The proposed locations for the new cells include some or all of the same BLM land.
“The Bureau of Land Management has a trust responsibility for the protection of those cultural resources,” Clow, the tribe’s environmental programs director, told me. But when High Country News asked the BLM to confirm that the required inspections were being carried out, the agency declined to comment despite public records that indicated the BLM was aware of its responsibility back in 2004 and referred HCN to the Utah Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control. HCN has obtained some public records from the BLM and the Utah agency, but none of them show that any archaeological surveys were performed after 1985.
THE FIGHT TO CLOSE White Mesa Mill has been a multigenerational journey for Yolanda Badback and her family. As a young girl, she accompanied her uncle, Norman Begay, to meetings where he and other tribal members spoke out against the mill, fearing it would contaminate their water, land and community. After his death, Badback and her mother, Thelma Whiskers, formed a group called White Mesa Concerned Community to educate their neighbors about uranium, which can cause both short-term and long-term health problems, including lung cancers, kidney problems, birth defects and miscarriages.
Meanwhile, the mill continues to affect the community of White Mesa, disturbing the landscape and possibly impacting the locals’ health. Badback has witnessed it all: the smokestacks, the changing water, the mining trucks that speed by, the death of the vegetation. Over the years, she has attended public hearings and testified before county commissioners and lawmakers from Blanding to Salt Lake City, arguing that the mill needs to be shuttered and the land reclaimed. She is often one of the few to speak up in town halls full of people from the nearby town of Blanding, many of whom support the mill or have jobs there. At times, Badback’s efforts have been met with furious opposition, and she’s been accosted and harassed while grocery shopping in Blanding.
But Badback and other tribal members are determined to keep fighting, submitting public comments, writing letters to the Utah DEQ, and holding an annual protest, marching from the White Mesa community center to the gates of the White Mesa Mill. Most recently, the tribe filed petitions to review and to intervene against the amendment to Energy Fuels Resources’ radioactive waste license. One day, they hope, the mill will be gone and cleaned up, and future generations will be able to thrive in the landscape their ancestors knew thousands of years ago.
Beyond its impacts on the Ute Mountain Ute, the mill’s critics say its story illustrates the enduring legacy of environmental racism, as well as the ways that Indigenous communities have been exploited by extractive industries. According to the EPA, there are 15,000 abandoned uranium mines scattered across 14 Western states, mostly Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Wyoming. About 75% of those mines are on federal and tribal lands.
“These companies, even the government, identify poor, brown, Black communities and intentionally pollute us, knowing that they capitalize off of it. This has a direct impact on the psyche of Native peoples,” Talia Boyd (Diné), the cultural landscapes manager for Grand Canyon Trust, said. “Because these are sacred places, these are places where we go to heal, these are places where we go to gather medicine. When it’s compromised by radioactive contaminants or contamination, then we are exposed, (because) it compromises the integrity of our landscape to heal us.”
As for Badback, she has made her position clear. “I will stand my ground,” Badback told me. “I will not stop until the day that I get this mill to close and get it cleaned up.”
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