What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
Here’s how indictments work in the United States’ legal system.
"Grand jurors hear from only one side of the case, the prosecution’s, and can indict a defendant with a simple majority.
A Manhattan grand jury hasindicted Donald J. Trumpfor his role in paying hush money to an adult film star. That is only the first step in what is likely to be a long legal battle.
An indictment, whether it is handed up in federal or state court, is a formal accusation — not a conviction — and it is among the first moves a prosecutor can make to bring a case to trial.
When a person is indicted in a criminal court in the United States, it means that a grand jury composed of residents chosen at random believed there was enough evidence to charge that person with a crime. Such panels, generally convened by judges at the request of prosecutors, meet for weeks, and can hear evidence in a variety of cases. The judge is not present during grand jury proceedings after the jurors are chosen, and jurors are able to ask the witnesses questions.
Unlike a criminal trial, where a jury has to reach a unanimous verdict, a grand jury can issue an indictment with a simple majority. In this case, there were 23 grand jurors, meaning at least 12 had to agree on an indictment.
Grand jurors hear evidence and testimony only from prosecutors and the witnesses that they choose to present. They do not hear from the defense or usually from the person accused, unlike in a criminal trial where proceedings are adversarial. (Defendants in New York have the right to answer questions in front of the grand jury before they are indicted, but they rarely testify.Mr. Trump declined.) That one-sided arrangement often leads defense lawyers to minimize indictments and argue that prosecutors could persuade jurors to “indict a ham sandwich,”a proverbial phrase that former Vice President Mike Pence used on CNN Thursday night.
As in other criminal cases, the exact charges against Mr. Trump are under seal and will not be revealed until he is brought to Manhattan Criminal Court for a formal arraignment, which is expected to happen on Tuesday.
At that point, the indictment will be unsealed, initiating the case’s next phase. Prosecutors will share their evidence with defense attorneys, who often ask a judge to dismiss the case on various legal grounds.
A trial is not guaranteed and may not be scheduled for months, as both sides will most likely argue over the merits of the case and what evidence can be presented to a jury."
Bragg’s office criticizes top Republicans for aiding ‘Trump’s efforts to vilify’ him.
"The letter described as unfounded the three members’ allegations that the investigation was politically motivated.
A day after filing charges against Donald J. Trump, the Manhattan district attorney’s office wrote a letter criticizing three influential congressional Republicans for their efforts to interfere in the investigation into the former president.
The letter was addressed to three committee chairmen who had demanded that the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, provide them with communications, documents and testimony related to the inquiry into Mr. Trump.
The office’s letter noted that before being indicted, Mr. Trump had used his social media platform to denigrate Mr. Bragg, and had threatened “death and destruction”if he were to be charged.
“You could use the stature of your office to denounce these attacks and urge respect for the fairness of our justice system and for the work of the impartial grand jury,” Leslie Dubeck, the general counsel for the district attorney’s office, wrote.
“Instead, you and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump’s efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges,” Ms. Dubeck wrote, describing as unfounded the three members’ allegations that the investigation was politically motivated.
The letter, addressed to Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, chairman of the Judiciary Committee; James R. Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the Oversight and Accountability Committee; and Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, chairman of the Administration Committee, repeated portions of an earlier one Ms. Dubeck had sent them, calling the Republican request for confidential information about the investigation unprecedented.
“Like any other defendant, Mr. Trump is entitled to challenge these charges in court,” she wrote, adding, “What neither Mr. Trump nor Congress may do is interfere with the ordinary course of proceedings in New York State.”
Ms. Dubeck and the Republicans have traded two letters apiece since Mr. Trump’s arrest prediction on March 18, which prompted his political allies to rush to his side.
Responding to news of the indictment on Thursday evening, Mr. Jordan tweeted one word: “Outrageous.”
The back-and-forth highlights the politically charged nature of Mr. Trump’s indictment, which has thrown the 2024 presidential race into new territory and threatens to test national and state institutions and the rule of law.
The Republican effort to influence Mr. Bragg’s investigation mimics Mr. Trump’s own efforts, while he occupied the White House, to tar law enforcement officials as partisan actors motivated solely by politics.
Mr. Trump continued that line of attack on Thursday. In a statement, he called Mr. Bragg a “disgrace” and said “this Witch-Hunt will backfire massively on Joe Biden,” who defeated him in the 2020 presidential race, has had nothing to do with the district attorney’s investigation and has not commented on the indictment.
Concluding her letter, Ms. Dubeck urged the congressional Republicans to withdraw their demand for information about the investigation “and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference.”
But she said that the office was willing to meet with the chairmen or their staffs, and asked for a list of questions for Mr. Bragg and a description of the types of documents they were requesting."
Police Relied on Hidden Technology and Put the Wrong Person in Jail
"Randal Reid spent nearly a week in confinement, falsely accused of stealing purses in a state he said he had never even visited.
Randal Quran Reid was jailed after he was mistaken for a Louisiana suspect during a traffic stop near Atlanta.Nicole Craine for The New York Times
On the Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, Randal Quran Reid was driving his white Jeep to his mother’s home outside Atlanta when he was pulled over on a busy highway. A police officer approached his vehicle and asked for his driver’s license. Mr. Reid had left it at home, but he volunteered his name. After asking Mr. Reid if he had any weapons, the officer told him to step out of the Jeep and handcuffed him with the help of two other officers who had arrived.
“What did I do?” Mr. Reid asked. The officer said he had two theft warrants out of Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish, a district on the outskirts of New Orleans. Mr. Reid was confused; he said he had never been to Louisiana.
Mr. Reid, a transportation analyst, was booked at the DeKalb County jail, to await extradition from Georgia to Louisiana. It took days to find out exactly what he was accused of: using stolen credit cards to buy designer purses.
“I’m locked up for something I have no clue about,” Mr. Reid, 29, said.
His parents made phone calls, hired lawyers and spent thousands of dollars to figure out why the police thought he was responsible for the crime, eventually discovering it was because Mr. Reid bore a resemblance to a suspect who had been recorded by a surveillance camera. The case eventually fell apart and the warrants were recalled, but only after Mr. Reid spent six days in jail and missed a week of work.
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Mr. Reid’s wrongful arrest appears to be the result of a cascade of technologies — beginning with a bad facial recognition match — that are intended to make policing more effective and efficient but can also make it far too easy to apprehend the wrong person for a crime. None of the technologies are mentioned in official documents, and Mr. Reid was not told exactly why he had been arrested, a typical but troubling practice, according to legal experts and public defenders.
“In a democratic society, we should know what tools are being used to police us,” said Jennifer Granick, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.
A Contract With Clearview AI
Detective Andrew Bartholomew’s affidavit seeking an arrest warrant for Mr. Reid.
In a panic, Mr. Reid’s family immediately retained an Atlanta lawyer from the Cochran Firm. He could not get Mr. Reid out of jail, and he struggled to gather more information. He suggested that the family members hire someone in Louisiana, so they cold-called law firms in Jefferson Parish and Baton Rouge until they found Thomas Calogero, a criminal defense lawyer. They retained him that Sunday.
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Mr. Calogero found out that Mr. Reid was accused of the summer thefts of two Chanel purses and a brown Louis Vuitton bag, collectively worth almost $13,000, from Second Act, a consignment store on the outskirts of New Orleans. Mr. Calogero went to the store and talked to the owner, who showed him a still from a surveillance camera. He realized that one of the alleged fraudsters looked like Mr. Reid, but the man was heavier.
Thieves with stolen credit cards bought nearly $13,000 in merchandise from Second Act, a consignment store outside New Orleans.Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times
“The guy had big arms, and my client doesn’t,” Mr. Calogero said. A Jefferson Parish sheriff’s officer insisted it was a “positive match,” language that made Mr. Calogero believe that facial recognition technology had been used, and he spoke to the New Orleans news outletNOLA.comabout what he believed had happened.
A New Generation of Chatbots
A brave new world.A new crop of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence has ignited a scramble to determine whether the technologycould upend the economics of the internet, turning today’s powerhouses into has-beens and creating the industry’s next giants. Here are the bots to know:
ChatGPT.ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from a research lab, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to respond to complex questions, write poetry, generate code,plan vacations and translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March,can even respond to images (and ace the Uniform Bar Exam).
Bing.Two months after ChatGPT’s debut, Microsoft, OpenAI’s primary investor and partner,added a similar chatbot, capable of having open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic, to its Bing internet search engine. But it was the bot’s occasionally inaccurate, misleading andweird responses that drew much of the attention after its release.
Ernie.The search giant Baidu unveiled China’s first major rival to ChatGPT in March. The debut of Ernie, short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,turned out to be a flop after a promised “live” demonstration of the bot was revealed to have been recorded.
A person with direct knowledge of the investigation confirmed to The New York Times that facial recognition technology had been used to identify Mr. Reid. Yet none of the documents used to arrest him disclosed that.
Andrew Bartholomew, the Jefferson Parish financial crimes detective who sought the warrant to arrest Mr. Reid,wrote in an affidavitonly that he had been “advised by a credible source” that the “heavyset black male” was Mr. Reid. Reached by phone, Detective Bartholomew declined to comment.
“It’s untenable to me as a matter of basic criminal procedure that people who are subject to arrest are not informed of what got them there,” said Barry Friedman, a constitutional law professor at New York University.
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The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office first signed up for Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology in 2019.
The Sheriff’s Office has a contract with one facial recognition vendor:Clearview AI, which it pays $25,000 a year. According to documents obtained by The Times in a public records request, the department first signeda contract with Clearviewin 2019.
Clearview scraped billions of photos from the public web, including social media sites, to create a face-based search engine now used by law enforcement agencies. Mr. Reid has many public photos on the web linked to his name, including on LinkedIn and Facebook. The public information office for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about the use of Clearview AI.
The company’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, said an arrest should not be based on a facial recognition search alone.
“Even if Clearview AI came up with the initial result, that is the beginning of the investigation by law enforcement to determine, based on other factors, whether the correct person has been identified,” he said. “More than one million searches have been conducted using Clearview AI. One false arrest is one too many, and we have tremendous empathy for the person who was wrongfully accused.”
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Detective Bartholomew’s identification of Mr. Reid led toa second warrant for his arrestin East Baton Rouge Parish, where, according to a police report, the man he resembled had used a stolen credit card to buy a $2,800 Chanel bag at another consignment store.
The Baton Rouge Police Department “trusted the information” from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, a department spokesman, Sgt. L’Jean McKneely, said. “What methods they used, we do not know,” he added.
Law enforcement officers generally say they do not need to mention the use of facial recognition technology because it is only a lead in a case and not the sole reason for someone’s arrest, protecting it from exposure as if it were a confidential informant. But according to Clare Garvie,an experton the police use of facial recognition, there arefourotherpubliclyknowncasesof wrongful arrests that appear to have involved little investigation beyond a face match, all involving Black men. She has come across a handful of other examples across the country, she said, in her work with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
For Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a racial justice advocacy group, the technology exacerbates the problems of what he called “racist policing.”
“If facial recognition was misclassifying white people, white men or white women, it would not be on the shelf,” he said. “Some of us and some of our communities are expendable.”
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‘Rubber-Stamping Warrants’
Electronic warrant services like CloudGavel allow judges to sign arrest warrants digitally.
To get a warrant to arrest someone, an officer must convince a judge there is probable cause — meaning, essentially, there is a good reason to do so — and get the judge’s signature. In the past, that meant an officer had to go to court, or even meet a judge at a diner in the middle of the night if the case was urgent. That is a moment when questions are asked about the strength of the evidence, legal experts say.
But the friction of getting a warrant has been eased by technology. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office uses an “eWarrant” service,CloudGavel, for whichit paid $39,800 last year. It’s an app that allows officers to request digital signatures from judges. “Law enforcement officers can now get an arrest warrant approved in minutes,” the company’s website states.
Many civil liberties advocates actually favor electronic warrants; they allow judges to more easily review decisions made by the police and eliminate a complaint from officers that it’s too hard to get a warrant. But advocates said it would be worrisome if judges were simply clicking a button without asking questions or providing sufficient scrutiny.
“There are real questions about whether it increases the incidence of judges rubber-stamping warrants,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director with the A.C.L.U.’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
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A warrant issued in Jefferson Parish for Mr. Reid’s arrest appears to have been signed digitally by a judge.
A criminal court judge signed off on Mr. Reid’s arrest warrant at 4:28 p.m. on July 18. CloudGavel “accommodates” judicial scrutiny, said Casey Roussel, the president and chief operating officer of CloudGavel’s parent company, FusionStak, in an email. He said judges could “connect with the officer via phone or video to discuss any concerns the judge may have about the warrant.”
In Mr. Reid’s case, it is unclear if the detective spoke with the judge or explained the nature of the “credible source.” The judge declined to comment.
A ‘Random Query’
Body camera footage obtained by The New York Times shows DeKalb County police officers detaining Mr. Reid.
“I was driving the normal speed, and I wasn’t doing anything crazy,” Mr. Reid said of the day of his arrest.
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Body camera footage obtained by The Times reveals that four police vehicles were involved in pulling him over. The two warrants for his arrest asked for “full extradition.” To the law enforcement officers in Georgia, Mr. Reid would have appeared to be a fugitive from Louisiana justice.
Why exactly Mr. Reid and his white Jeep attracted the DeKalb County police’s attention that day is unclear. The arresting officer wrote inan incident reportthat he had learned about Mr. Reid’s warrants from a “random GCIC/NCIC query of the vehicle tag,” referring to the National Crime Information Center, an F.B.I. repository of wanted persons and vehicles, and the Georgia Crime Information Center. It’s possible the officer saw Mr. Reid driving by and, for some reason, decided to run his license plate.
A DeKalb County police report said a random check of Mr. Reid’s license plate had turned up the arrest warrants.
But Molly Kleinman, the director of a technology policy research center at the University of Michigan, said many kinds of surveillance technologies on the highway could have alerted the officer to Mr. Reid’s presence on the “hot list,” including toll pass readers andautomated license plate readers, which Atlanta has in thehundredson roads and police vehicles. (A spokesman for the DeKalb County police said a license plate reader was not used.)
“There’s a lot of secrecy about all of these surveillance technologies and the ways that they’re used,” Ms. Kleinman said. “This case is a perfect example that even when the tool works as intended, if the underlying data is flawed it can still harm innocent people.”
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“Thousands of dollars for something I didn’t do,” said Mr. Reid, who is considering suing over his arrest.Nicole Craine for The New York Times
Mr. Reid sat in DeKalb County jail for nearly a week. He could not be released on bond because he was supposed to be held until Louisiana officers came to pick him up for prosecution in their state. His Jeep was towed and impounded.
“Imagine you’re living your life and somewhere far away says you committed a crime,” Mr. Reid said. “And you know you’ve never been there.”
His lawyer, Mr. Calogero, gathered photos and videos of Mr. Reid from his family, hoping to more clearly show the Louisiana police what Mr. Reid looks like, and sent them to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday, Nov. 30, five days after the arrest. An hour later, Mr. Calogero said, an officer called to inform him that the police were withdrawing the warrant because they had noticed a mole on Mr. Reid’s face that the alleged purse thief did not have.
Mr. Reid’s detainment was “unfortunate by all means,” Sheriff Joseph P. Lopinto III of Jefferson Parish said. “As soon as we realized it wasn’t him, we moved mountains in order to get him out of jail.”
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A Jefferson Parish judgerecalled the warranton Wednesday afternoon. “After further investigation, it was learned Randal Reid was not involved in the crimes committed,” the recall said. Mr. Reid was released late Thursday night, almost a full week after being pulled over. He is considering filing a wrongful-arrest lawsuit.
“Thousands of dollars for something I didn’t do,” he said.
Mr. Robinson, the Color of Change president, said most people in the United States did not have thousands of dollars to clear their names. These people will have “names and stories we will never know,” he said. “They will languish in jails and prisons.”
Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter based in New York. She writes about the unexpected and sometimes ominous ways technology is changing our lives, particularly when it comes to our privacy.@kashhill
Ryan Mac is a technology reporter focused on corporate accountability across the global tech industry. He won a 2020 George Polk award for his coverage of Facebook and is based in Los Angeles.@RMac18"
Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses
"Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged.
Students walking between classes at the University of Idaho. The state will ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification, one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters this year.Rajah Bose for The New York Times
Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.
In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.
But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.
“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of theUCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.
“Then, six, eight, 10 years later, these terrible ideas become law,” he said.
Turnout in recent cycles has surged for young voters, who were energized by issues like abortion, climate change and the Trump presidency.
But even with such gains, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program for theBrennan Center for Justice, said there was still progress to be made.
“Their turnout is still far outpaced by their older counterparts,” Mr. Morales-Doyle said.
Now, with the 2024 presidential election campaign underway, the battle over young voters has heightened significance.
Gov. Brad Little of Idaho gave his approval to a law that bans student ID cards as a form of voter identification.Kyle Green/Associated Press
Out of 17 states that generally require voter ID, Idaho will join Texas and only four others — North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee — that do not accept any student IDs, according to theVoting Rights Lab, a group that tracks legislation.
Arizona and Wisconsin have rigid rules on student IDs that colleges and universities have struggled to meet, though some Wisconsin schools have been successful.
Proponents of such restrictions often say they are needed to prevent voter fraud, even though instances of fraud are rare. Two lawsuits were filed in state and federal court shortly after Idaho’s Republican governor, Brad Little, signed the student ID prohibition into law on March 15.
“The facts aren’t particularly persuasive if you’re just trying to get through all of these voter suppression bills,” Betsy McBride, the president of the League of Women Voters of Idaho, one of the plaintiffs in the state lawsuit, said before the bill’s signing.
A fight over out-of-state students in New Hampshire
In New Hampshire, which has one of the highest percentages in the nation of college students from out of state, G.O.P. lawmakersproposed a bill this yearthatwould have barred voting access for those students, but it died in committee after failing to muster a single vote.
The University of New Hampshire had opposed the legislation, while students and other critics had raised questions about its constitutionality.
The bill, which would have required students to show their in-state tuition statements when registering to vote, would have even hampered New Hampshire residents attending private schools like Dartmouth College, which doesn’t have an in-state rate, said McKenzie St. Germain, the campaign director for the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, a nonpartisan voting rights group.
Sandra Panek, one of the sponsors of the bill that died, said she would like to bring it back if she can get bipartisan support. “We want to encourage our young people to vote,” said Ms. Panek, who regularly tweets about election conspiracy theories. But, she added, elections should be reflective of “those who reside in the New Hampshire towns and who ultimately bear the consequences of the election results.”
A Texas ban on campus polling places has made little headway
In Texas, the Republican lawmaker who introduced the bill toeliminate all polling places on college campusesthis year, Carrie Isaac, cited safety concerns and worries about political violence.
Voting advocates see a different motive.
“This is just the latest in a long line of attacks on young people’s right to vote in Texas,” said Claudia Yoli Ferla, the executive director of MOVE Texas Action Fund, a nonpartisan group that seeks to empower younger voters.
Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate all college polling places in the state.Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Ms. Isaac has also introduced similar legislation to eliminate polling places at primary and secondary schools. In an interview, she mentioned theMay 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers — an attack that was not connected to voting.
“Emotions run very high,” Ms. Isaac said. “Poll workers have complained about increased threats to their lives. It’s just not conducive, I believe, to being around children of all ages.”
The legislation has been referred to the House Elections Committee, but has yet to receive a hearing in the Legislature. Voting rights experts have expressed skepticism that the bill — one of dozens related to voting introduced for this session — would advance.
G.O.P. voting restrictions flounder in other states
In Virginia, one Republican failed in her effort to repeal a state law thatlets teenagers register to votestarting at age 16 if they will turn 18 in time for a general election. Part of a broader package of proposed election restrictions, the bill had no traction in the G.O.P.-controlled House, where it died this year in committee after no discussion.
And in Wyoming, concerns about making voting harder on older people appear to have inadvertently helped younger voters. AG.O.P. billthat would have banned most college IDs from being used as voter identification was narrowly defeated in the state House because it also would have banned Medicare and Medicaid insurance cards as proof of identity at the polls, a provision that Republican lawmakers worried could be onerous for older people.
“In my mind, all we’re doing is kind of hurting students and old people,” Dan Zwonitzer, a Republican lawmaker who voted against the bill, said during a House debate in February.
Georgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, a rule that means students at private institutions, like several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
In Ohio, which has for yearsnot accepted student IDs for voting, Republicans in January approved a broader photo ID requirement that also bars students from using university account statements or utility bills for voting purposes, as they had in the past.
The Idaho bill will take effect in January. Scott Herndon and Tina Lambert, the bill’s sponsors in the Senate and the House, did not respond to requests for comment, but Mr. Herndon said during a Feb. 24 session that student identification cards had lower vetting standards than those issued by the government.
“It isn’t about voter fraud,” he said. “It’s just making sure that the people who show up to vote are who they say they are.”
Republicans contended that nearly 99 percent of Idahoans had used their driver’s licenses to vote, but the bill’s opponents pointed out that not all students have driver’s licenses or passports — and that there is a cost associated with both.
Mae Roos, a senior at Borah High School in Boise, testified against the bill at a Feb. 10 hearing.
“When we’re taught from the very beginning, when we first start trying to participate, that voting is an expensive process, an arduous process, a process rife with barriers, we become disillusioned with that great dream of our democracy,” Ms. Roos said. “We start to believe that our voices are not valued.”
