Downtown South Skeptics Say Kane Isn’t Playing Ball
Everything you need to know for Friday, Dec. 4: COVID’s criminal backlog + NC’s wandering cops + more border separation cruelty
Friday, Dec. 4, 2020
1 day until my new refrigerator gets delivered!
6 days until Hanukkah
10 days until the Electoral College votes
21 days until Christmas
27 days until this cursed year ends
47 days until this cursed presidency is over
Today’s Number: 5,637
Cases of COVID-19 reported in North Carolina on Thursday, over 1,000 more than the state’s previous one-day high.
Governor Cooper: “There are a lot of people who are doing the right things. But it’s irresponsible to ignore the rules and to create situations where people can become infected. This is why we are concentrating on enforcing the rules that we have in place. But everything is on the table in the weeks to come.” (N&O)
+ ABOVE THE FOLD
—> Downtown South Skeptics Say Kane Isn’t Paying Ball
ONE Wake, the coalition that arose in reaction to John Kane’s proposed Downtown South megaproject, says Kane Realty bailed on negotiations over living wages and affordable housing, the N&O reports.
ONE Wake to the Raleigh City Council: “Our overall impression is that Kane has walked away from the negotiating table with ONE Wake, and is instead pursuing a series of discreet deals in private, and in doing so is keeping everyone else in the dark of what’s being offered and to whom.”
Kane rep Bonner Gaylord: “I don’t know where that is coming from.”
—> WHAT’S HAPPENING: The project’s rezoning request goes back to the planning commission on Tuesday. If the planning commission makes a recommendation, the city council will take a vote on the rezoning the following week. ONE Wake wants to lock in certain commitments before any of that happens. Specifically:
20% of the residential units will be affordable
Workers during construction and at Downtown South will be paid at least $20 an hour.
Rose Cornelious, development director of Dorcas Ministries: “We just certainly think that a project of this scope, this size, should certainly be able to address affordable housing and also wages. Ensuring that women and minority contractors are included in the bargain.”
—> YEAH, BUT: Gaylord—a former council member—says that’s not possible.
“There isn’t a way to use a zoning condition to dictate what third-party businesses that have no relationship with that agreement must do. So all the tenants and folks who are working on the site for other companies there is no control there.”
Those issues can be taken up during the next stage—the incentive package Kane says the city needs to agree to for the project to become feasible. Gaylord says they need the rezoning finished by the New Year, when the deal closes.
Not good enough, Cornelius says: “We are disappointed in what we have received so far. We’ve approached this with open hearts and willingness. We know he has to make money and his investors have to make money, but on the other hand, we don’t want people displaced. We don’t want gentrification.”
—> THE DEAL: If Downtown South crashes and burns, I suspect it will be over the incentive package, not a rezoning vote taken a week before Christmas. I’m also not sure whether ONE Wake has the political clout Anna Johnson is affording it.
Worth remembering: Aside from David Cox, the anti-development crew got crushed in last year’s city elections. Stef Mendell lost by 39 points.
Then again: People love to hate rich developers. And Kane is asking for a tax break.
—> RELATED: David Cox is back on his big-city-hating bullshit.
+ LOCAL & STATE
—> COVID Is Backlogging Prosecutions All Over the State
For most of the years, the state’s courtrooms have sat empty, which has clogged the state’s justice system. As of Oct. 31, there were more than 980,000 pending criminal cases throughout the state, according to the NC Watchdog Reporting Network. Mecklenburg County has more than 100 pending homicide cases. Traffic cases are getting postponed for months.
“Looking at caseloads between July 1 and Oct. 31, 2019, and the same period in 2020, the number of new felony cases filed decreased by nearly 4%, while the number of pending felony cases increased by 15%.”
“Court data reviewed by the N.C. Watchdog Reporting Network suggest violent felonies are taking significantly longer to resolve since the pandemic began. From July 1 to Oct. 31, the median age of pending assault by strangulation cases was 264 days—50% longer than the same period last year.”
“Cases of assault inflicting serious bodily injury increased by more than one-third. Cases with murder and first-degree murder charges both increased by more than 15% and the median age of habitual misdemeanor assault cases increased by more than 25%.”
District attorneys across North Carolina said the pandemic requires them to change drastically the way they prosecute cases and run their offices.
In Union County, the suspension of trials over the past eight and a half months gave felony defendants more leverage, [Trey] Robison said.
“We suddenly had folks who had no incentive to plead,” Robison said. “They knew if we rejected their plea offer, we could not bring their case to trial.”
—> DPI Spent COVID Bucks Without Proper Safeguards
A state audit has found that the Department of Public Instruction spent $76 million in CARES Act money without procedures in place to see if it was being spent effectively. According to Policy Watch:
DPI received $316 million to support its operations during the pandemic. It passed much of the money on to school districts.
In part, the audit found that DPI distributed:
$31 million of Coronavirus Relief Funds for the Summer Learning Program without a method to ensure student ability was improved.
$37 million of Coronavirus Relief Funds for nutrition services without establishing a method to measure results.
The DPI—headed by soon-to-depart Superintendent Mark Johnson—blamed the State Board of Education.
—> NC Sheriffs’ Association Tries to Solve Its “Wandering Cop” Problem
A wandering officer—or, less delicately, a “gypsy officer”—is a cop who, in lieu of getting fired for misconduct, is allowed to resign and move on to another agency. In its report on improving policing—which it hustled out to preempt the governor’s Task Force on Racial Equity in Criminal Justice report—the NC Sheriffs’ Association contemplated how to fix this problem, Triad City Beat reports.
“Applicants for law enforcement positions are required to sign waivers allowing a division investigator to access prior employment information. ‘However, even with that waiver, sometimes former employing law enforcement agencies are hesitant to share some information in personnel records with division staff or with a hiring agency,’ the sheriff’s association acknowledged in its report.”
State law contains civil and criminal penalties for improperly disclosing personnel files, which can leave some agencies gunshy despite the waiver.
“To remedy the problem of ‘wandering officers,’ the sheriff’s association is recommending that the General Assembly amend state law to explicitly state that civil or criminal liability is waived for agencies releasing employment records to a hiring agency or to the standards divisions at the NC Sheriff’s Association and NC Criminal Justice Education & Training Standards Commission.”
—> BETTER IDEA: Why not amend state law to recognize that not only are police officers paid with our tax dollars, but they’re permitted to use force us on behalf of the state—paid for by our tax dollars—so maybe everyone who wants to should be able to see what’s in Johnny Law’s internal affairs file?
—> The North Carolina Roundup
Paul Newby won the recount in the SCONC chief justice race. Cheri Beasley wants another one. (N&O)
The town of Youngsville plans to hold a Christmas parade in defiance of Governor Cooper’s pandemic restrictions. (N&O, WRAL)
North Carolina bar owners are struggling under pandemic restrictions—and the ABC system. (TCB)
North Carolina schools will be able to do free COVID tests for students. (N&O)
The bodies of two men were found in a training area on Fort Bragg. (WRAL)
The World War II vet and food scientist who created the Slim Jim recipe died of COVID in a Raleigh assisted living facility. (N&O)
The N&O has named Sharif Durhams its new managing editor. Maybe Robyn Tomlin will be able to sleep every once in a while. (N&O)
—> Weather
Partly cloudy during the day, high of 60, rain likely at night. Weekend: ran on Saturday, sunny Sunday. (WRAL)
+ NATION & WORLD
—> The Lede: Send Them to The Hague
For months, the legal advocates a federal judge tasked with finding more than 600 missing migrant families the Trump administration separated at the border in 2017 and 2018 asked the government for any additional data that might help, to no avail. Then last week, the feds produced a bunch of phone numbers and addresses.
“NBC News reported last month that the parents of 666 migrant children had yet to be found by pro bono lawyers, making the path to reunification difficult for many. The filing Wednesday said some families have been identified since then, bringing the number of parents whose whereabouts are still unknown to 628. With the new data, which lawyers said they have not had adequate time to review, the number could be reduced further.”
Lee Gelernt of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project: “We have been repeatedly asking the Trump administration for any additional data they might have to help locate the families and are only finally getting these new phone numbers and addresses. Unfortunately, it took the issue reaching the level of a presidential debate to move them to give us this data.
Gelernt: “Everyone's been asking whether the Trump administration has been helping to find these families. Not only have they not been helping, but they have been withholding this data forever.”
US Representative Joaquin Castro, being more diplomatic than me:
—> CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY: I’m not naive enough to think that anyone in the administration will face justice for this moral obscenity. But in a better world, there would be hell to pay.
—> Trump Moves to Keep Political Hacks in Place
From delaying the GSA’s ascertainment to going AWOL at the height of the pandemic to (almost certainly) signing off on the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist, the lame-duck president has gone out of his way to create headaches large and small for the president-elect. Now he’s looking for ways to block the Biden administration from showing dozens of his political appointees the door, ProPublica reports.
There are “32 political appointees whom the administration has sought to hire into civil service positions in the first three quarters of this year, a phenomenon known as ‘burrowing’ that occurs at the end of every administration.”
One of them: “One of the highest-profile positions went to Tracy Short, who built his career in government litigating immigration cases, mostly in Texas. In 2017, he became principal legal advisor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it embraced a hard line on deportations. And in July, he was appointed chief immigration judge at the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review—a prosecutor now running a court system that decides asylum cases.”
—> BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE: Because of an executive order Trump signed in October allowing him to strip current civil servants of protections, he could fire and replace a whole bunch more over the next seven weeks.
—> Briefs: 3 Stories to Read Today
“The United States on Wednesday recorded its single-worst daily death toll since the pandemic began, and on a day when Covid-19 hospitalizations also hit an all-time high, the pace of loss showed no signs of slowing any time soon. Not since spring, during the pandemic’s first peak, were so many deaths reported. The high point then was 2,752 deaths on April 15. On Wednesday it was at least 2,760.” (NYT)
RELATED: “President Trump on Wednesday released a 46-minute videotaped speech that denounced a ‘rigged’ election and was filled with lies the day after his own attorney general joined election officials across the country in attesting to his defeat. Mr. Trump recorded what he said ‘may be the most important speech I’ve ever made’ in the Diplomatic Room of the White House and delivered it behind a lectern bearing the presidential seal.” (NYT)
“Three women arrested last year as part of a high-profile ‘human trafficking’ sting in Florida were sentenced recently as part of plea agreements with Palm Beach County prosecutors. While avoiding further jail time, the women must still pay the state some hefty fees for allegedly facilitating the sexual gratification of massage customers, including New England Patriots' owner Robert Kraft. Meanwhile, all charges against Kraft were dropped in September. … No one was ever charged with human trafficking. In fact, the women providing massages and sex acts—the group that authorities said they were in it to rescue—were the ones who faced the most severe charges.” (Reason)
“As the coronavirus has spiked across the country, leaving a record 100,226 Americans hospitalized on Wednesday, travel nurses, who work on temporary contracts for higher fees and move from city to city, have become more urgently needed than ever. … Demand for travel nurses has increased by more than 40 percent in the last month …. At least 25,000 nurses work in travel nursing, though the number fluctuates, and hospitals have depended on them for decades. It is a nomadic existence and, in a pandemic, a particularly high-risk one.” (NYT)
—> The Rundown
About 1 million people filed for unemployment or Pandemic Unemployment Assistance last week. (DOL)
Facebook will start policing anti-Black hate speech more than “anti-white” comments, which … they weren’t doing already? Really? (WaPo)
Senator David Purdue has made a lot of stock trades connected to his Senate committee’s oversight, which is probably a coincidence. (NYT)
Kraken lawyer Lin Wood has given money to Democrats, and right-wing media is on it. (Breitbart)
The Senate confirmed Trump nominee Christopher Waller to the Fed, making him the first Fed nominee confirmed during a lame duck. (NYT)
The Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear Trump’s increasingly quixotic challenge to the state’s election. (WaPo)
The economy is set to roar back next summer—if we don’t screw it up. (NYT)
+ OUR SO-CALLED LIVES
—> Cultured: Hitler in the Bunker
In The New Yorker, Alex Ross contemplates the cottage industry dedicated to reconstructing Hitler’s final days, which began with the 2006 film Downfall, which bases its most famous scene in part on at least one source created for Stalin.
In the context of Hitler, the scene of Untergang gives comforting moral closure to a story of limitless horror. No matter how high the dictator might have risen, the fable suggests, he was destined to fall in the end. History supplies no such neat ending in the case of other genocidal dictators, such as Stalin and Mao, both of whom died of natural causes. The endless fixation on Hitler’s last days therefore offers a too-easy narrative gratification: the devil is dispatched to hell, as in “Don Giovanni.”
—> Et Cetera
Warner Brothers is making all of its 2021 films—Dune, Matrix 4 (that’s a thing?), Godzilla vs. Kong, Suicide Squad 2 (dear God, why?), a Sopranos prequel—available for streaming on HBO Max when they’re released to theaters, a potential death knell for the movie industry as we know it (though WB says it’s temporary). (NYT)
A bunch of the usual Christmas blockbusters/Oscar wannabes are headed to streaming/VOD—including Wonder Woman 1984, I’m Your Woman, Another Round, Black Bear, Prom, Greenland, The Midnight Sky—though some are sticking to what’s left of movie theaters. (AV Club)
Acclaimed Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru, one of few Black women in the field, says she was fired over a critical email. (WaPo)
Imagine scrolling the internet and discovering that your third-grade picture has become a meme. Meet Adrian Smith. (Slate)
For no reason in particular, here is a photo collection from the Philadelphia General Hospital School of Nursing from the 1880s through the 1970s. (JSTOR)
Thanks for reading. Have a good weekend.