The Washington Post National Weekly - September 23, 2018

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Buried under bodies Even with murder rates falling, big-city detectives face daunting caseloads PAGE 12

EPTEMBER 23, 2018 2 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

3 SUNDAY, September, 23, 20183

KLMNO WEEKLY KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX THE FIX

Is a federal shutdown coming?

Is a federal shutdown coming?

A MBER P HILLIPS

they head into midterms.

But it looks as if allthey those arguments have head into midterms.

A MBER P HILLIPS gone unheard. Trump doesn’t want aasborder But it looks if all those arguments have resident Trump significantly upped wall fight later, according this tweet — anddoesn’t want a border gonetounheard.

Trump the chances that the government will significantly upped resident Trump the seven other timeswall he fight has threatened to to this tweet — and later, according shut down at the endthe of chances this coming that the government will shut down the government in as many the seven other weeks. times he has threatened to week. In a tweet Thursday, Trump shut down at the end of this coming He wants a border wall Another shutfight downnow. the government in as many weeks. simultaneously signaled thatweek. he’d In be aokay tweet Thursday, Trump way to read that: He wantswall a fight now. Another He genuinely wants a border with a government shutdown over immigrasimultaneously signaled that he’d be okay government shutdown, andtothere’s way read little that:ConHe genuinely wants a tion and that there’s little can doshutdown to withCongress a government over immigragress can do to dissuade him. government shutdown, and there’s little Conchange his mind. tion and that there’s little Congress can do to Trump could always change histomind.

In him. gress can do dissuade “I want to know, where themind. money for changeishis the spring, he threatened to veto a spending Trump could always change his mind. In Border Security and “I thewant WALL in this to know, where is the money for bill, only to sign it hours later. he Butthreatened as the to veto a spending the spring, ridiculous Spending Bill, andSecurity where will Border andit the WALL in this weeks tick closer to the endonly of the year, bill, to fiscal sign it hours later. But as the come from after theridiculous Midterms?Spending Dems are Bill, and where will it Trump has gotten much more bold in threatweeks tick closer to the end of the fiscal year, obstructing Law Enforcement come fromand afterBorder the Midterms? Dems are ening, and even embracing, shutdown.

He more bold in threatTrump ahas gotten much Security. REPUBLICANS MUST Law FINALLY obstructing Enforcement and Border SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS flat-out said this month shutdown ening,that andaeven embracing, a shutdown. He GET TOUGH!” he tweeted.

Security. REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY WALSH/ASSOCIATED be good PRESS politicsflat-out for him.said this month that a shutdown Trump’s tweet comes as TOUGH!” Congress is GET hedoing tweeted.President Trump has implied he is okay with a SUSANcould “I is would do it,a because think it’spolitics a greatfor him. couldI be good everything it can to avoid this. tweet Lawmakers doesn’tPresident get border wall money.

Trump’s comes as shutdown Congress ifishe doing Trump has implied he okay with political issue,” he told reporters.

“I would do it, because I think it’s a great have tried to get spending bills it to can his desk everything to avoid this. Lawmakers shutdown if he doesn’t get border wall money.

That is the exact opposite ofissue,” how everyone political he told reporters. thought Trump was on board weeks earlier than normal.

They to have have tried get(gasp) spendingGOP billsleaders to his desk else was in Washington Trump ThatBut is the exact may opposite of how everyone The plan was toGOP pause this border wallTrump reached across the aisle to keep thethan governleaders thought on board thinks. weeks earlier normal.with Theyit.have (gasp) have different calculations. may be trying else inHeWashington thinks. But Trump may after the with midterm bypause ment open. They evenreached came up withthe a plan it. Theelections plan was to this border wall across aisle tofight keepuntil the governto rally his baseby so hehave doesn’t get blamed for different calculations.

He may be trying pushing fundingfight the until Department recently to kick some of the bigThey spending after the ofmidterm elections ment open. even came up withoffa plan majorities to rally his basein soConhe doesn’t get blamed for Security, which hasoffjurisdiction fights — like Trump’s recently border wall — tosome after of Homeland pushing funding theRepublicans’ Departmentlosing of their to kick the big spending Bell, a former GOP Senate budget Republicans’ losing their majorities in Conover the— wall, until December. the November midterm elections, evenborder Homeland Security, whichgress. has Steve jurisdiction fights — like Trump’s wall to after aide, has predicted that Trump doa what gress.

Stevewill Bell, former GOP Senate budget Trying to even get Trump hiswall, border though lawmakers desperately want tomidterm fund over the until wall December. the November elections, against that the Trump will do what aide,backed has predicted funding the government on time this year and weredesperately on Tryingthetofiscal get year Trump he hisnaturally border does wall when though lawmakers wantbytoSept. fund 30, when wall: up controversy and rallydoes his base. he naturally when backed against the ends, to befunding too messy fight. 30, It iswhen track to do so for major bya Sept. thestir fiscal year theagencies. government on time this year was and going were on Shutting down the government take a and rally his base. wall: stir up to controversy one that Republicansends, maintain they to would But in just one tweet, Trump all agencies. was going be too messy a fight.

It is track to doshredded so for major stand for one of his quintessential campaign Shutting down the government to take a almostshredded surely lose, they don’t havemaintain that work. He called the bill Trump one that Republicans they would But compromise in just one tweet, all because promises fits that prettyfor well. one of his quintessential campaign votes in the for surely the $5lose, billion designed to avoid a shutdown almost because they don’t havebill stand that work.“ridiculous.”

He called thethe compromise bill Senate would meanpromises that, asfitsRepublican that bill pretty well.

Trump“ridiculous.” wants to startthe building histhe wall, at forThat He questioned why there aren’ttobillions it votes in Senate the $5 billion designed avoid in a shutdown lawmakers go one try to save that, as Republican That to would mean least billions not before election in building to build his border wall and, perhaps most Trump wants to start his wall, at direction He questioned why there aren’t in ita contentious their majorities in Congress, Trump going lawmakers go is one direction to try to save which Democrats wantnot to give Trump a worrying for Republicans, questioned their least before a contentious election in to build his border wall and, perhaps mostdon’t in to thegive opposite he sticks toinwhat theirif majorities Congress, Trump is going single win. their commitment to getting border wall to which Democrats don’t want Trumpone. a And worrying for money Republicans, questioned he tweeted Thursday, in it significantly the opposite increasone. And if he sticks to what The result bewin. a shutdown on him after the midterms. single commitment to getting border wallend money to would es atheshutdown chances that will shut hegovernment tweeted Thursday, it significantly increasRepublicans’ watch, weeks their would con- be What Trump is pooh-poohing is a deal Thebefore end result on the him after the midterms. at their the end of this week,that despite escoming the chances the government will shut trol of Congress the line. Republican precisely to avoid a government shutdown, Republicans’ watch, weeksdown before conWhat Trump is pooh-poohing is a dealis on of Congress’s efforts. down leaders shutdown, think that would equivalent of theallline. and he knows it. Congress reached trolbe ofthe Congress is on Republican precisely to avoid athis government n at the end of this coming week, despite all©The Washington Post of Congress’s efforts. n shooting themselves the feet weeks spending deal the other and House leaders think thatbefore would be the equivalent of and week, he knows it. Congress reached this in shooting themselves in the feet weeks before spending deal the other week, and House ©The Washington Post

BY

P

BY

P

LMNO KLMNO WEEKLY

CONTENTS

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our by editors at The This publication was prepared partner publications across the country.

Washington PostAll forarticles printingand and distribution by our columns have previouslypartner appeared in The Post or onthe country. AllPOLITICS publications across articles and washingtonpost.com andcolumns have been edited to fit this have previously appeared in The THE PostNATION or on format. For questions orwashingtonpost.com comments regarding content, and have been editedTHE to fitWORLD this please e-mail weekly@washpost.com.

If you have a format. For questions or comments regarding content, COVER STORY question about printing please quality,e-mail wish to subscribe, or weekly@washpost.com.

If youENTERTAINMENT have a would like to place a hold on delivery, contact your question aboutplease printing quality, wish to subscribe, BOOKS or local newspaper’s circulation would department. like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your OPINION © 2018 The Washington Post local / Year newspaper’s 4, No. 50 circulation department.FIVE MYTHS © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 50

WEEKLY

CONTENTS 4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Detroit homicide detectives investigate fatal THE COVER Detroit homicide POLITICS 4 aON shooting detectives investigate a fatal THE NATIONin August.8Despite sweeping there in August. Despite shooting THE WORLD changes, 10police arrestSTORY suspects in12 fewersweeping than half changes, police there COVER of all killings. Photo arrest suspects in fewer than half ENTERTAINMENT 16 by SALWAN GEORGES, The Washington of allPost killings. Photo by SALWAN BOOKS 18 GEORGES, The Washington Post OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23

3 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018 20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Kavanaugh accusation tests motto of #MeToo MONICA HESSE is a Washington Post columnist writing about gender and its impact on society.

Last year, shortly after #MeToo spread as a hashtag and shorthand, a companion phrase also emerged: “Believe women.” ¶ In other words, believe them when they tell stories of assault and harassment. Victims’ lives are rarely made easier by levying accusations against powerful per­ petrators, which means that if a woman has come forward, she’s probably doing so at personal cost. So believe her. At the very least, give her the dignity of considering her claims.

Last Sunday, a California professor named Christine Blasey Ford identified herself as the previously anonymous accuser claiming Brett M. Kavanaugh assaulted her when they were in high school. At a party in the 1980s, she said, a drunken Kavanaugh tried to pull off her bathing suit, pinning her down while holding his hand over her mouth. Ford said she remained traumatized enough about the event that she brought it up in therapy in 2012; her therapist provided The Washington Post with documentation. Kavanaugh has categorically denied the accusation.

The alleged incident — decades old, lacking forensic evidence — exists in the uncomfortable, unknowable place that a tawdry “Law & Order” episode might have once dismissed as “he said, she said.”

Now, it’s a test of what it looks like to believe women. And how we decide what we believe. It’s a test of whether, in the past year, we’ve learned anything at all.

It’s easier to say you “believe women” when there are 60 of them and they’re all telling the same story about being drugged

by Bill Cosby or assaulted by Harvey Weinstein.

Can you say you believe women when there are only 10 accusers?

Only five? Can you say you believe

women when there is one accuser, and her account is 35 years old, and she says she doesn’t remember certain details, like the address of the party or who else was there?

Can you say you believe women when it’s deeply inconvenient for you to do so? When your decision to believe her could hinder you from getting other things you want? A few weeks ago, a reader emailed me saying he really missed seeing Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose on television. The reader was angry at all the women who had accused them of harassment. He was inclined to disbelieve these women because his mornings were more pleasant when Matt Lauer was on the air.

What about when it’s not Matt Lauer — when it’s a Supreme Court nominee? What about when you’re a Republican senator, and you think the accused man can be the kind of justice that America really needs, and all you have to do to get him on the bench is to decide that this particular woman is lying?

Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) both came forward last Sunday to say the confirmation should be paused until Ford is given a chance to testify. She had requested that the FBI investigate her claim before she testifies, though there were negotiations about appearing

ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Brett M. Kavanaugh, nominee for the Supreme Court, has been accused of assaulting a woman when they were in high school.

before the committee this week.

If the vote is not delayed until after Ford testifies, the message that comes across is: Let’s believe women, but not right now. After the vote, we’ll believe women.

Maybe we’ll believe them after the midterms.

Are you willing to believe one woman if it means explicitly, definitively not believing one man? How many women’s testimonies are worth one man’s protestations? In the long list of vastly important issues facing America today, where do you place “believing women”? Is it above or below, say, “climate change” or “upholding Citizens United”?

These aren’t meant to be leading or accusatory questions.

They’re not even really about Brett Kavanaugh. They’re about what it means to develop your personal moral code when cases are deeply messy, as these types of cases often are. These questions are about forcing yourself, honestly, to imagine what standards you would be applying if the accused were from a different political party. Or if the accuser were. Or if the timing of the accusation were different. Or, or, or . . .

Would you find this accusation credible if it were levied against Colin Kaepernick? Bill Clinton? A boss you loved? A boss you hated?

If your answers would change

depending on these circumstances, you’re not really interested in believing women.

You’re interested in how their pain can be useful to your politics.

Please note that I haven’t written a word about whether Christine Blasey Ford is telling the truth. Please note that I haven’t written a word about whether, if the accusations are true, Kavanaugh’s nomination should be rescinded.

You don’t have to have an opinion yet on whether she’s telling the truth to have an opinion on whether the vote should be postponed.

Of course it should be. The vote should be postponed so the charge can be investigated. That’s how the Senate can show it believes women. By saying, We believe women’s stories should be heard. We believe this is a serious enough topic to deserve our attention.

During Kavanaugh’s four days of grilling before the Judiciary Committee, he was asked multiple times about gender equality and sexual harassment and the treatment of women. He said it was a “broad national problem that needs to be addressed, including in the judiciary.”

He’s right. He’s absolutely right.

In this instance, you don’t even have to believe women to do the right thing. Just believe him. n

4 22

SUNDAY, September,23, 23, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

The death of the peace process DAVID IGNATIUS writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.

This month commemorates two pinnacles for the benign, naive superpower that was the United States, both involving our now-lost role as Middle East peacemaker. Forty years ago, President Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt; and 25 years ago, President Bill Clinton presided over the signing of the Oslo Accord between Israel and the Palestinians.

As we looked this past week at the old photographs of beaming U.S. presidents grandly mediating between adversaries, what was happening in today’s Middle East? Russian President Vladimir Putin was cutting a deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to avert a catastrophe in Syria and carve up that country in a peace of the tyrants.

Russia as a Middle East bullyboy has been a nuisance for the United States. Russia as the hegemonic regional power that brokers peace deals may be a more serious problem.

The United States doesn’t look so indispensable these days if you’re an Egyptian, Palestinian or Syrian — or a Saudi, Emirati or Iraqi, for that matter. Under President Trump, the United States has ceded the mediating role to others. Trump’s idea of a peace plan is “maximum pressure,” the demonstrably false idea that he can bludgeon Palestinians (or Iranians) into making peace on his terms by starving them of money, food, medical care and other basics.

If maximum pressure could bring peace, the Israelis would have bested the Palestinians decades ago. The reality, it turns out, is that as people become poorer materially, they cling to their dignity and often become less compromising.

Sadly, this month of peace anniversaries forces us to reckon with the reality that the efforts of a generation of Americans, Israelis and Arabs to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have largely come to naught. The “peace process,” as we knew it, is dead. To speak of Palestinian rights these days is to draw scorn, or just a big yawn. The Palestinians are yesterday’s problem. Even the Arabs are tired

BY LISA BENSON

of their fractious demands.

The Palestinians are among modern history’s biggest losers.

You can argue that it’s their own fault — that they kept balking at the peace deal that Israel would accept in hopes that if they waited and kept agitating, they could get more. The four-year-plus “intifada” that followed the Oslo agreement was a self-destructive waste for the Palestinians, poisoning good feeling in Israel.

The same is true of Gaza, which greeted Israeli evacuation with continuing, self-defeating attempts to kill Israelis.

As a journalist who covered the Middle East in the years when Israeli-Palestinian peace was a diplomatic obsession, I have a trunkful of memories of how peace kept receding, even as U.S. mediation advanced.

To try to understand the Palestinians better, I lived for a week in 1982 in the West Bank village of Halhul with a stonecutter named Hammadeh Kashkeesh. What I took away was just how attached these people were to their land, and how vexed they were by the Israeli settlements sprouting around them and eventually preventing Kashkeesh from tending his beloved grapevines.

It wasn’t that Kashkeesh wanted to kill Israelis: He had

jumped into a swimming pool to rescue an Israeli boy when he was a young waiter at a resort, even though he didn’t know how to swim. It was about dignity. When I saw him again a few years ago, that pride had become brittle, and the gentle peacemaker was gone.

PLO leader Yasser Arafat spoke with me many times over those years, wanting to communicate with the United States — but Israel, not so much. He played a cynical politics of personal survival. He allowed his chief intelligence officer to maintain secret contact with the CIA, even as he kept trying to kill Israelis.

He wanted a peace deal, so long as he could hold out for a better one.

The Palestinians deserved better.

No American has struggled harder with this problem than my friend Martin Indyk, Clinton’s ambassador to Israel and chief negotiator for President Barack Obama’s unsuccessful peace attempt. “The peace I worked on for 35 years will not be achieved in our lifetimes,” Indyk told me this past week. “But it will happen eventually, because there is no other way.”

That’s the faith that sustained U.S. peacemakers, and perhaps doomed them, but may someday sustain their successors. U.S. power remains entwined with the aspiration for a better world. n

5 21

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Prescribing playtime is absurd KATHERINE MARSH is a children’s author and the former managing editor of the New Republic. Her most recent novel is “Nowhere Boy.” This was written for The Washington Post.

Last month, I picked up my children from their first day back in American elementary school after three years at a French school in Belgium. They both looked glum. “Did you make any friends?” I asked hopefully.

“What’s the point?” my 7-year-old daughter said. “Recess is too short.”

In Brussels, they had 50 minutes of recess plus a 20minute mid-morning break. In Washington, they have 30 minutes of recess total. The school district here guarantees just 20 minutes, and some American schools offer just 15 minutes, which is the amount of time it takes most children just to get out the door. In Belgium, regardless of the weather, recess was always outdoors. In the District, if it’s too hot, too cold or too rainy, the children have indoor recess — which, at our school, Lafayette Elementary, is held in the classroom because of a lack of available gym space. Later that week, my 10-year-old son reported watching a short film at school about how the kids of my generation “didn’t have video games and had to play board games.” The point, he explained, was that kids should get off screens and play together (never

mind the irony of teaching this message through a screen).

Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report detailing the developmental importance of play and suggesting that doctors write “prescriptions” for it during early-childhood checkups. Calls for increased playtime have been out there before — including in previous AAP reports and from nonprofit groups like KaBoom and the U.S. Play Coalition — but the idea of “prescribing play” made headlines, showing up in a range of media from the New York Times to People magazine.

This is an important cause, but after I spent three years in Europe, the fact that child development experts had to “prescribe” play to get society to listen struck me as ridiculous, much like using a movie to promote screen-free time. To justify children’s natural behavior

to parents and teachers, it apparently has to be presented as a data point. Play can’t be just what children do or what they enjoy — it has to serve a purpose.

There is nothing wrong with having a sense of purpose when it comes to parenting or teaching children, especially in comparison with the more neglectful practices of the past.

But increasingly in America, there is a sense that every moment of a child’s life must be purposeful. As a children’s book writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about the unique ways children process the world; in life, as in literature, moments of growth and discovery are more likely to take place in the absence of adults, not when they micromanage.

This tyranny of purpose also exhausts parents and teachers: Instead of letting children play for an extra half-hour in a state of semi-supervised chaos, we supervise them while they do something educational. But because no one has that level of constant energy, we end up relying on screen-based activities billed as educational, even when our instincts tell us they are not.

Does anyone really think a 6-yearold should be playing math games on an iPad instead of running around outside?

This relentless emphasis on purpose flows from a heightened sense of competition. Several years ago, I met an Italian parent at my son’s American elementary school who noted a sense of academic purpose in even very young children. He offered a theory: Anxiety over the next generation’s economic prospects and fear of losing a foothold in the meritocracy put parents under pressure to invest in their children’s skills earlier as a competitive advantage.

But by always driving children to be purposeful, are we giving them a better future or a worse one? One way to gauge this is to look at our own sense of satisfaction as parents. An ocean of ink has been spilled on the topic of how stressful parenthood has become, in large part because we don’t allow ourselves to stop parenting. It may well be more honest — and more beneficial to children — to teach them that we all need downtime.

No one wants his or her child to become a purposeless adult. But part of the joy of childhood is doing things because they anchor you to the moment, not because they will reap future benefits or rewards.

True play is freedom from purpose, and no doctor can prescribe that. n

66

SUNDAY, September,23, 23, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

‘I don’t have an attorney general’

BY A SHLEY P ARKER AND P HILIP R UCKER

P

resident Trump’s declaration that “I don’t have an attorney general” was not merely the cry of an executive feeling betrayed by a subordinate.

It was also a raw expression of vulnerability and anger from a president who associates say increasingly believes he is unprotected — with the Russia investigation steamrolling ahead, anonymous administration officials seeking to undermine him and the specter of impeachment proceedings, should the Democrats retake the House on Nov. 6.

In a freewheeling and friendly interview published Wednesday, Trump savaged Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mocking the nation’s top law enforcement official for coming off as “mixed up and confused” during his Senate confirmation hearing and for his “sad” performance on the job.

Though Trump has long railed against Sessions, both publicly and privately, for recusing himself from overseeing the Justice Department’s Russia probe, the president’s comments to Hill.TV brought his criticism to a new level.

“I don’t have an attorney general,” Trump said. “It’s very sad.”

Publicly, at least, Trump is going through the ordinary motions of being president. He met with the visiting president of Poland and on Wednesday toured the flood-ravaged Carolinas to survey damage from Hurricane Florence.

Next week, he will host scores of foreign dignitaries at the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan.

Behind the scenes, however, Trump is confronting broadsides from every direction — legal, political and personal.

The president, as well as family members and longtime loyalists, fret about whom in the administration they can trust, people close to them said, rattled by a pair of unauthorized insider accounts this month from inside the White House. A senior administration

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump’s latest attack on Sessions underscores his anger and sense of betrayal and vulnerability official penned an anonymous column in the New York Times describing a “resistance” within to guard against the president’s impulses, while Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” offers a portrait of a president seemingly unfit for the office.

“Everybody in the White House now has to look around and ask, ‘Who’s taping? Who’s leaking?

And who’s on their way out the door?’ It’s becoming a game of survival,” said a Republican strategist who works in close coordination with the White House and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

Some of Trump’s allies believe he has legitimate cause for worry.

“The president should feel vulnerable because he is vulnerable — to those that fight him daily on implementing his agenda,” Stephen K. Bannon, a former chief White House strategist, wrote in a text message.

In some respects, Trump has

maintained a sanguine outlook.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort recently became the latest former member of the president’s inner circle to agree to cooperate with federal prosecutors. But Trump has been uncharacteristically calm about the plea deal for Manafort, whom he had praised only a month ago for refusing to “break” under pressure from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Asked if he was worried about Manafort’s cooperation agreement, Trump told reporters Wednesday: “No, I’m not. . . . I believe that he will tell the truth.

And if he tells the truth, no problem.”

Nonetheless, Trump’s screed against Sessions underscored the president’s sense of anger and what he considers to be a betrayal by his attorney general, who, despite executing much of the president’s hard-line, law-and-order agenda, has never been able to

Attorney General Jeff Sessions listens with President Trump during a roundtable on “sanctuary cities” in March at the White House.

Sessions’s recusal from the Russia probe continues to infuriate Trump.

recover from what Trump views as an unforgivable sin: his recusal from the Russia investigation for a conflict of interest, which ultimately led to Mueller’s appointment.

Trump told Hill.TV that he appointed Sessions out of blind loyalty, a decision he now regrets.

Sessions’s aggressive and controversial immigration actions — including emphasizing “zero tolerance” for those who come to the country illegally and defending the administration policy of separating families — have been cheered by Trump allies. But the president criticized his attorney general even on this front, in a striking expression of his deep dissatisfaction.

“I’m not happy at the border, I’m not happy with numerous things, not just this,” Trump said, referring to the Russia probe.

The president’s attack on Sessions raised concern in the law enforcement community and also prompted reactions ranging from exasperation to outright dismay.

“Trump doesn’t just blur the lines, he flat out tries to eradicate those lines,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama nominated by President Barack Obama. “He wants a consigliere, not an attorney general. On the one hand, it’s a pitiful thing to watch, but it’s also deadly serious, because the attorney general does not protect the president. The attorney general protects the American people. And the fact that we have a president who doesn’t understand that is alarming.”

After taking yet another public tongue-lashing from the president, Sessions gave a speech Wednesday to law enforcement officials in Waukegan, Ill., in which he effusively praised Trump.

Even as Sessions was dutifully showering compliments upon his boss, Trump was unwilling to throw him a lifeline.

“I’m disappointed in the attorney general for many reasons,” Trump told reporters before leaving for North Carolina. “You understand that.” n ©The Washington Post

77

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Apple uses its sway to avoid tariffs

BY T ONY R OMM AND D AMIAN P ALETTA

A

pple CEO Tim Cook has been one of President Trump’s staunchest critics in Silicon Valley, opposing the White House on immigration, climate change and more.

But the 57-year-old tech leader has also become one of the technology industry’s savviest political operators — a behind-thescenes Trump whisperer, able to shape some of the administration’s economic policies in ways that benefit Apple and some of its tech peers.

Those efforts seemed to pay off this past week, after Trump unveiled tariffs on roughly $200 billion in goods imported from China, the latest salvo in the trade war Washington is waging against Beijing. The initial list of imports the White House had threatened to penalize included some of Apple’s best-known products, the company said this month, such as its recently updated Apple Watch smartwatch, HomePod home assistant and AirPods wireless headphones (but not the iPhone). At Monday’s announcement, though, those products were spared. Thousands of other imports weren’t so lucky, and Americans could soon be paying more for such things as refrigerators and toys.

For months, Cook had lobbied Trump personally against adopting such tariffs, according to people familiar with the Apple executive’s efforts and Cook’s public comments. Apple warned the Trump administration in a regulatory filing this month that the government’s proposal could result in higher prices on some of the world’s most popular consumer electronics.

“Our concern with these tariffs is that the U.S. will be hardest hit, and that will result in lower U.S. growth and competitiveness and higher prices for U.S. consumers,” Apple said. Apple added that the policy would have amounted to a “tax on U.S. consumers,” who rely on its products, like the Apple

STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS

Despite his criticism of Trump, CEO Tim Cook has also been reaching out to lobby him on issues Watch, particularly to monitor their heart health.

Asked on Tuesday about the Trump administration’s decision, Cook told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he believes the White House “looked at this and said that it’s not really great for the United States to put a tariff on those type of products.”

The Trump administration has acknowledged Cook’s effect on its thinking. “We’ve spoken to Mr. Tim Cook many times,” said Larry Kudlow, the White House economic adviser, during an appearance a day earlier in New York.

“He’s given us some good advice.”

A spokesman for the White House did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Apple declined to comment.

A person briefed on the planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House matters, said there was a concerted decision to ex-

empt a group of consumer products late in the discussions, with the understanding that they could be added to the final set of tariffs Trump has threatened to impose. The decision was not made as a way to intentionally carve out Apple, as many other companies benefited.

Cook’s appeals to Trump on trade appeared to intensify this spring. The Apple executive scored a rare invitation to the White House state dinner to honor the visiting French president in April, and a day later, Cook privately huddled with Trump at the White House to express his view that “tariffs were not the right approach” with China, Cook later told Bloomberg Television.

The outreach eventually spared Apple from at least one headache: The company’s iPhone dodged steep new fees entering the country in Trump’s earlier round of tariffs. But Trump still

Apple CEO Tim Cook has become one of the technology industry’s savviest political operators, able to shape some economic policies.

ratcheted up his attacks on China in the weeks to follow and over the summer proposed two more rounds of tariffs covering a host of goods, including Apple-made consumer electronics.

That touched off another allout lobbying blitz on Apple’s part.

Cook paid a visit to Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, N.J., in early August to dine with the president and again talk tariffs, according to two people familiar with the meeting who were not authorized to speak on the record.

The president initially bristled at Apple’s comments about the potential effect of tariffs, proposing that Apple could fix the problem by making more of its products in the United States. Yet he appeared to acknowledge in a tweet on Sept. 8 that prices on Apple’s products “may increase because of the massive Tariffs we may be imposing on China.” But the Trump administration on Monday ultimately decided against imposing tariffs on key technologies like its AirPods, HomePod and Apple Watch.

“The iPhone is assembled in China, but the parts come from everywhere,” Cook told ABC on Tuesday in response to a question about the tariffs. “The glass comes from Kentucky, there are chips that come from the United States, and of course the research and development is all done in the United States.”

For Apple, there could be headaches still to come. China is taking steps to retaliate against Trump’s new tariffs, a major threat for the iPhone giant, which attributes about one-fifth of its $229 billion in annual revenue to China. Trump has signaled he would impose tariffs on all other Chinese products if tensions continue to escalate.

That means Apple products, including the iPhone, eventually could become caught in the middle.

Cook told ABC on Tuesday that he is “optimistic that the two countries will sort this out, and life will go on.” n ©The Washington Post

8 12

SUNDAY, September,23, 23, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

COVER STORY

A numbers problem A Post survey finds departments with more homicide detectives usually have higher arrest rates

BY K IMBRIELL K ELLY, AND S TEVEN R ICH

W ESLEY L OWERY

in Detroit

Detroit police Sgt. Andrew Guntzviller investigates the scene of a fatal shooting with his team in the early hours of Aug. 14.

It had been less than 24 hours since homicide Lt. Michael Russell had been summoned to a killing, and now, on a hot Saturday morning in July, he was headed to yet another. ¶ One of his sergeants texted him with a message and a location: “Man, can’t get a breather, Fatal Shooting, Greiner/Fairport, John Doe.” ¶ This time, the body had been found lying in a playground in front of the swings. ¶ Since 2012, someone has been slain nearly every 24 hours in De­ troit, a city long plagued by violence. Despite sweeping changes to make the homicide division more efficient, police arrest suspects in fewer than half of all killings. ¶ Russell said the explanation is simple: There are too many killings and too few detectives. ¶ “The only way you can fix it is lower crime or to get more manpower,” Russell said.

9 13

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

Over a five-year period, each detective in Detroit has been tasked with solving an average of about eight new slayings annually — a caseload exceeding what policing experts say should be no more than five homicides per detective, per year.

Major police departments that are successful at making arrests in homicides generally assign detectives fewer than five cases annually, according to a Washington Post analysis of homicide caseloads in 48 cities, including Detroit.

The Post study found that departments with lower caseloads tended to have higher arrest rates, while departments with higher caseloads tended to have lower arrest rates — 39 of the 48 departments fell within that pattern.

The findings come at a time when homicide rates have fallen nationwide, yet police are making arrests less often — in 37 of the 48 cities, homicide arrest rates have

declined over the past five years.

Solving homicides often hinges on a combination of factors, including community trust, deployment of detectives, and departmental morale and leadership. It takes time and effort to train seasoned homicide investigators who are effective at solving cases. But the workload of detectives can be one of the most critical factors, policing experts said, leading to failures that perpetuate the cycle of unsolved homicides.

Investigators wrestling with older, still-active cases are unable to devote their full attention to new homicides, police said. This leads to fewer arrests and an even deeper backlog of open cases.

To explore the connection between staffing levels and homicide arrest rates, The Post surveyed 50 major-city police departments for the number of homicide detectives they employed in 2016, the last year with reliable data. That number was then com-

pared with the average number of homicides annually from 2012 to 2016 to calculate annual caseloads per detective. Two cities — New York and Philadelphia — declined to disclose the number of homicide detectives, and two others provided only current staffing levels.

While there is limited academic research about the correlation between detective caseload and homicide arrest rates, a 2008 FBI study concluded that departments whose detectives had fewer than five cases a year had higher arrest rates.

“Any city that has a homicide detective handling more than five cases is kidding themselves,” said Vernon Geberth, who wrote the textbook used by many police departments to teach homicide investigation. “Even the best detective can’t handle more than five cases.”

The Post analysis found nine departments in two categories that were exceptions to the over-

A variety of guns sit in a Detroit police evidence storage room. Over a fiveyear period, each Detroit homicide detective has been tasked with solving an average of eight new slayings annually.

all pattern indicating a relationship between caseload size and arrest rate.

In five of the nine cities, detectives had lower caseloads but also had among the lowest arrest rates — Pittsburgh, Miami, Denver, Buffalo and Chicago.

Chicago had the worst arrest rate of the 50 cities surveyed — 24 percent of killings led to an arrest.

The department hired additional detectives in recent years, bringing its total number of homicide investigators to 208 and the caseload down to 3.1 killings per detective.

Kevin Graham, president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, said the department has struggled for years because Chicago had been down about 100 homicide detectives because of retirements.

“We’ve lost a lot of experience and knowledge in the department that hasn’t been passed on to these new officers yet,” Graham said.

10 14

Four other cities did not fit into the pattern because detectives had high caseloads but also had among the highest arrest rates for killings they investigated — Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Memphis and Tulsa.

In Tulsa, for example, the department has a comparatively small number of investigators — 10 detectives — who each handled an average of 5.6 killings a year.

But the department made an arrest in 68 percent of the homicides reported from 2012 through 2016. Police attribute the arrest rate to their mobilization of the entire homicide unit for each case.

“We throw a lot of people at it.

The whole unit comes in, the gang unit gets called in, and there is an immediate dissemination of information,” said Sgt. Dave Walker, who recently retired after overseeing Tulsa’s homicide unit for seven years. “We don’t have the same amount of murders of a St. Louis or Chicago. You wouldn’t be able to use the same strategy if you’ve got three murders a night.

But for us, it’s still manageable.”

Police officials said the average caseload rates calculated by The Post, using the average number of annual homicides, may underestimate detective workloads.

In most cities, police deploy multiple detectives to investigate each homicide.

In Fresno, Calif., each killing is worked by a pair of detectives. In Boston, officials said the homicide unit is broken into eight squads of three or four detectives.

In Richmond, officials estimate that each detective assists in nearly 12 homicides, even though the average caseload is just under three killings per detective.

Homicide investigators also are often tasked with investigating other types of cases, including overdose deaths, suicides, accidental deaths and nonfatal shootings.

And annual average caseloads also do not take into account open homicides from recent years, which still require the management of witnesses and evidence. Those cases may eventually become “cold cases” after a certain period of time has passed, but until then, they remain the responsibility of the detectives assigned to them.

In St. Louis, the department’s 24 detectives have a rate of 6.4

SUNDAY, September,23, 23, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER

cases per detective each year.

Detectives are handling a backlog of open cases from prior years as the city’s arrest rate has steadily declined — from 56 percent in 2012 to 36 percent in 2016.

“While they may only get five for 2018, if they have something that’s not solved from 2017 — one, two, three, four cases — their caseload is now nine,” said Maj. Mary Warnecke, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s commander of investigative services. “It’s hard to keep those open cases and then work on the ones you’re getting fresh.”

Many police departments never fully recovered from the Great Recession, said Rick Myers, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which comprises leaders from the largest police agencies in the United States and Canada. Police budgets and staffing levels were slashed, creating fierce internal competition for staffing — with patrol, property crime and violent crime units battling for personnel, he said.

“During a period of starvation, people are stealing bread and hiding food and not inviting anyone over for dinner. It’s kind of that way when it comes to resources in a police department,” Myers said. “Patrol is running short; they never have enough officers to staff their beats. But are you going to shortchange your investigative units so you can have more cops on the streets?”

In Stockton, Calif., police officials said they’ve had a shortage of homicide detectives since at least 2008, when the city was hit especially hard by the nation’s foreclosure crisis. The department was forced to lay off officers, institute pay cuts and leave jobs unfilled. The impact on murder investigations was immediate: The homicide arrest rate plummeted from 68 percent in 2008 to 24 percent in 2009.

“We were losing officers like crazy,” said Lt. Grant Bedford of the Stockton department’s investigations division.

In 2012, Stockton filed for bankruptcy, and killings hit a record high of 71, which meant each member of the six-person homicide unit worked an average of more than 10 cases, Bedford said. The Post analysis found that the department’s detectives han-

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

Detroit Deputy Police Chief David LeValley was tasked with improving the homicide arrest rate.

How homicide caseloads compare to arrest rates by police department Departments with lower caseloads tended to have higher arrest rates, while departments with higher caseloads tended to have lower arrest rates – 39 of the 48 departments fell within that pattern.

ARREST RATE LOW HIGH <30%

50%

70%+

100%

Tulsa police handled an average of 5.6 killings a year but made arrests in 68 percent of homicides from 2012 to 2016.

PATTERN

Charlotte

Fresno Tulsa

Richmond

Memphis

Albuquerque

Birmingham 0

Dallas

Boston

10

Pittsburgh Detroit Buffalo

Chicago police made an arrest in 24 percent of all homicides despite having detectives handle three cases per year.

New Orleans

New Orleans police made an arrest in 33 percent of homicides, the third-lowest arrest rate among 50 major U.S. cities. Each detective handled an average of 8.7 cases.

Chicago

0%

Caseloads are per homicide detective. Staffing data is for 2016, with the exception of Dallas and Memphis, which provided only current staffing levels.

Source: Post analysis

AARON WILLIAMS/THE WASHINGTON POST

dled an average of 6.2 cases each year and made an arrest in 22 percent of killings in 2016.

Bedford said that last year he put together a proposal asking that the department hire six more homicide detectives.

“They said it looked really good,” Bedford said. “But I didn’t get anyone.”

Elbert Holman, Stockton’s vice mayor and chair of the City Council’s Community Improvement and Crime Prevention Committee, said the recession forced the department to cut about onefourth of its force to repay creditors. But, he said, he thinks hiring more detectives would not increase the department’s homicide arrest rate.

Holman, who supervised the homicide unit at the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, said that Stockton’s low arrest rates are because detectives have failed to develop trust among the hardesthit communities, which are often home to poor, black or Latino residents. Holman, who is black, criticized the lack of diversity within Stockton’s homicide division.

“The police department has no relationship in those neighborhoods. So people don’t talk to them,” Holman said. “You can put 150 more officers in homicide, and it doesn’t mean you’re going to get more solved.”

Officials at departments that have been able to secure funding for additional officers said they have had trouble filling the open positions because qualified job candidates are deterred by increased criticism of police use of force. Fewer recruits in the pipeline leads to a smaller pool of homicide detectives.

“This is not a very wanted job anymore,” said Cmdr. Doug Eckert, who oversees the New Orleans Police Department’s criminal investigations division, which had a caseload of 8.7 homicides per detective in the Post study. He said the public controversies since the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., have made it difficult to recruit.

“In some ways, we created some of this problem. But we’re not the total problem.”

Even if a department can hire new detectives, police officials said it takes time before the officers are trained and can handle cases on their own.

11 15

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

COVER STORY In Phoenix, The Post found the rate was four homicides per detective after a hiring spree, but the experienced detectives are each juggling about six cases, officials said.

“All of the investigative bureaus got thinned out. Now we’re trying to build them back up,” said Capt. Sean Kennedy, who runs the Phoenix Police Department’s violent crime unit. “I’ve got 12 brand-new detectives in my homicide unit who won’t start taking cases on their own for close to a year.”

Overhauling a department When James Craig was hired in 2013 as police chief in Detroit, he became the seventh in 10 years.

He inherited a financial crisis — the city was an estimated $18 billion in debt and would soon file for bankruptcy, becoming the largest in U.S. history to do so. And his department had been under federal oversight for more than a decade for alleged civil rights violations, including illegally arresting witnesses who failed to cooperate in investigations.

“Despite that, we still had to manage running a police department,” Craig said. “. . . Here, we have fewer officers and we’re doing more with less.”

One of Craig’s first concerns was that the homicide unit was not solving enough cases — making an arrest in only one-third of its homicides. Craig promoted David LeValley from lieutenant to deputy chief and told him to come up with a new plan to solve homicides.

“A lot of our reputation as an agency . . . rests with homicide,” LeValley said. “You’re probably not going to look at a city and ask, ‘How many larcenies are there?’ ” At the time, the city’s 39 homicide detectives worked roundthe-clock in three rotating shifts.

They were dispatched from the downtown office to killings across the city’s 143 square miles.

LeValley concluded that was too much ground for any one detective to cover.

He redeployed detectives into five investigative districts, with the deadliest areas getting the most manpower. He also eliminated the overnight shift.

“They’re not going to be out interviewing witnesses at 4 in the morning. So they’re watching

DALTON BENNETT/THE WASHINGTON POST

When Detroit police were called out July 14 for a man found dead on a playground, they realized they were already behind: Neighbors had heard gunshots the night before. The man had been dead for at least nine hours.

movies in the office. It was a horrible waste of their time,” he said.

Under the new system, detectives go home at the end of the day shift and are called back to the office and paid overtime if there is a homicide at night. By moving the night shift entirely to daytime hours, each detective gained about a week of investigative time.

LeValley said he also began to require that the lead detective visit each homicide scene to increase ownership of the cases.

Before that, the overnight investigators would process the crime scene and turn over their notes to the lead detective.

“Maybe somebody went to a scene that wasn’t necessarily focused or didn’t have their heart into it, because they know this isn’t going to be my case,” LeValley said.

Officials said they believe the organizational changes have helped: In 2013, police made an arrest in 37 percent of killings.

That rate improved to 48 percent last year.

“You have all your investigators available in the daytime to deploy all your resources on these cases instead of taking your small group of people and splitting them up over a 24-hour shift,” said Russell, the Detroit police homicide lieutenant, who has worked under nearly a dozen

chiefs in his 23 years with the department.

The police department remains understaffed because of recent retirements and competition with other city departments for limited resources, said Detroit City Councilman Scott Benson, who chairs the council’s Public Health and Safety Committee.

“I’d like to give them more resources so that we can get our closure rate above the national average,” Benson said, but “we still have to clean the streets.

We’ve got to cut the grass. We’ve got to be able to staff our offices.

So, unfortunately, that’s not the only interest to Detroit.”

Detroit’s detectives handled about eight cases each per year, the Post study found.

Detectives with that many cases do not have time to stay in contact with witnesses and the victim’s family, brief supervisors in detail, and meet with the medical examiner, policing experts said.

David Carter, a criminologist at Michigan State University and a former police officer, recommends that each detective handle no more than three cases a year.

A smaller workload means a detective is able to respond more quickly to homicide scenes as they are discovered.

“Every piece of evidence or potential piece of evidence deteriorates with time,” Carter said.

KLMNO WEEKLY

‘Without the phone, it would have been much more difficult’ When Detroit police were called out the morning of July 14 to the John Doe found dead on a playground, they realized they were already behind: Neighbors had heard gunshots the night before. The man had been dead for at least nine hours.

Russell huddled with patrol officers and investigators. He took a call from his captain.

“He’s laying in the grass . . . We don’t know if he is from the neighborhood,” Russell told his boss. “We are doing canvasses, trying to tighten up the timeline. . . . That’s all we got.”

Someone from the medical examiner’s office pulled the white sheet back from the facedown body: The victim was thin and wearing a black T-shirt, jeans and a pair of Jordans.

Bullets had torn into the back of his shirt.

The official flipped the body over so they could see the man’s face. He searched his pockets.

A wad of cash, about $200, was still in his pocket. Police surmised that this was not a robbery and that the victim probably knew his killer. They found a 30-round magazine tucked into the dead man’s pants, but no gun. A cellphone was next to his body.

The call history showed that three people had repeatedly phoned the victim — but stopped just before the killing.

Police found video surveillance footage from a store in the area that showed the victim with two men about two hours before the homicide. Police also found witnesses who said they heard gunshots and saw those two men and a third person flee the park. Police identified the men and soon determined they were the ones who had been calling the victim.

Police arrested two of the men and charged them with murder in the death of 19-year-old Armani Keith VanBuren. The third suspect has not been arrested. VanBuren’s family could not be reached for comment.

“Without the phone, it would have been much more difficult,” said Eugene Schaden, the lead detective in the case. “I think we could have gotten there eventually, but not nearly as quickly as we did.” n ©The Washington Post

812

SUNDAY, September,23, 23, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Florence reveals flaws in storm scale

BY J OEL A CHENBACH AND E MILY W AX-T HIBODEAUX

R

olling across the Atlantic Ocean the other week, bearing down on the Carolinas, Hurricane Florence grew into a Category 4 storm, nearly a 5 — and that got everyone’s attention. People know that a Cat 5 is as big and bad as a storm can get.

In Craven County, N.C., authorities changed their voluntary evacuation order to “mandatory” for all 105,000 residents.

Then Florence ran into some shearing winds, and downshifted to a Cat 3 — and then a Cat 2.

That got everyone’s attention, too. In Craven County, thousands of residents decided to stay put.

Many regretted that decision when the storm shoved water up the Neuse River and over its banks, flooding historic New Bern. Roughly 1,300 people had to be rescued, some from the roofs of their homes or cars.

“A lot of people did stay because the storm went down from a Category 4 to a Category 2, and they think of that number as being the end all,” county public information officer Amber Parker said.

Florence was just a Category 1 storm when it made landfall on the beaches of North Carolina.

But no one in the Carolinas today thinks of Florence as a small hurricane — as “just a 1.”

The hurricane categories are determined by the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which has been used by the National Hurricane Center for decades. There’s now robust debate about whether the scale is overused or needs to be replaced.

The scale’s greatest virtue is that it’s easy to understand.

“It’s simple in a stressful world,” said Chia-Ying Lee, a research scientist at Columbia University who studies hurricane risk. But a more comprehensive threat rating for Florence might have made it a Category 4 or 5, Lee said.

The central problem with the Saffir-Simpson scale is that — as its full name clearly states — it

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Existing categories based on wind fail to take into account threats such as storm surge or rainfall measures only wind. It doesn’t capture such threats as coastal storm surge and heavy rainfall or say anything about the size of a hurricane.

“It’s almost as if they need to come up with a new code system.

Category 1 hurricane and category ‘something’ for the rainfall,” said Corinne Cutler Corr, a resident of New Bern who chose not to evacuate. She and her husband, a contractor, live on relatively high ground and thought they could help their neighbors who were riding it out.

The National Weather Service labored in advance of Florence to warn residents about the likelihood of record rainfall, catastrophic flooding and a potentially lethal storm surge, said Bill Lapenta, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. But Florence will spur discussion in the scientific community about how to describe hurricane threats in the future, he

predicted.

“We’re just becoming more sensitive to the need to communicate clearly,” he said.

Wind will always dominate the early public impression of a hurricane, because when storms are at sea, their wind field is their primary feature, noted Gina Eosco, who works for Cherokee Nation Strategic Programs and specializes in weather risk communication. First impressions linger, she said.

“If you think of a hurricane as a chapter book, the first few chapters, the main character may be wind. But as the story evolves and we have a better idea where it’s going, the story changes, and new characters come into play,” she said. “The issue is, some people still focus on the first chapter.”

Taylor Fontenot, a captain of an all-volunteer group known as America’s Cajun Navy that raced to help people affected by Florence, said it’s “real, real danger-

A street remains flooded at sunrise Wednesday in Fayetteville, N.C., in Florence’s wake. The nearby Cape Fear River crested at more than 60 feet, causing extensive flooding throughout the area.

ous when the weather people start downgrading storms. Then folks feel they are okay to ride it out. That’s when we get the lifeor-death scenarios.”

Another unhelpful phenomenon is the suspicion that experts and the news media are hyping a storm.

“Alarmist media at it again.

Overhyped Florence. Down two notches to Cat 2 already. Soon be Cat 1. They are still trying to hype it,” a Pennsylvania state legislator, Rick Saccone, declared on Twitter.

No one has produced a widely accepted metric to replace SaffirSimpson. Fashioning such a thing may be impossible — even unwise.

“I am not a fan of the SaffirSimpson scale or indeed any attempt to characterize a hurricane by a single number,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric science professor Kerry Emanuel said by email. “In my view, there is no substitute for a carefully worded, succinct statement of the threat that any particular storm poses.”

A storm’s rating on the SaffirSimpson scale often underestimates a storm’s destructive power. A classic example is Sandy, which barely had hurricane-force winds when it struck New Jersey and New York in October 2012 and caused scores of deaths and tens of billions of dollars in damage. A year earlier, Hurricane Irene had dwindled to a tropical storm when it arrived in the same region and generated record floods.

A very large storm with relatively low wind speed can produce a monster storm surge. That was the case with Hurricane Ike in 2008, which blew in from the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 2 with 110 mph winds — just 1 mph shy of Category 3 when it made landfall in Galveston, Tex. Ike’s lethal storm surge destroyed water gauges in Galveston, but researchers estimated that water levels during high tide spiked 20 feet.

Rain is notoriously the most underappreciated hurricane

139

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

NATION threat. Last year, Hurricane Harvey was a Category 4 storm at landfall near Corpus Christi, Tex., but the wind damage turned out to be a rounding error after Harvey stalled along the coast, dropped up to 60 inches of rain and triggered historic flooding in Houston. That brought back memories of the flooding in June 2001 from a similarly sluggish tempest that didn’t even rate as a Cat 1 — Tropical Storm Allison.

Perhaps the most important determinant of a hurricane’s destructive potential is the vulnerability of the places and people in its path. Much of the population of New Orleans lived below sea level when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Houston had a massive population living in areas prone to flooding. And Puerto Rico had economic and infrastructure challenges when Hurricane Maria slammed the island territory last September.

In the case of Maria, the Category 4 designation accurately captured the immediate destructive power of the storm. But the ensuing humanitarian disaster — officially blamed for 2,975 excess deaths over a six-month period — was off the charts.

One possible supplement to the Saffir-Simpson scale would be one based on integrated kinetic energy. It’s a measure of the power of winds across the breadth of the tropical cyclone. A storm like Florence would have a high IKE rating because it was a big storm — one that expanded as it neared land — with powerful winds extending 200 miles from the eye.

But the IKE would say nothing about peak wind speeds. Residents of South Florida who endured Hurricane Andrew in 1992 can attest that a Cat 5 storm is a different animal than a Cat 1.

Andrew, a compact hurricane, had winds that, according to a 2004 analysis, peaked at 167 miles per hour.

A wind scale plus an overallenergy scale would still say nothing about rainfall. And with Florence, the rain was the story.

“This would have been a 5 on the rainfall scale,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the author of a popular hurricane blog. n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Outreach efforts blaze a trail to greater diversity in parks L ORNET T URNBULL in Seattle BY

When Fawn Bauer started doing youth outreach at Mount Rainier National Park a decade ago, she made city kids a priority. Most could see the snow-capped icon from their neighborhoods — but too few of them were visiting.

So Bauer contacted schools with high rates of students receiving free and reduced-price lunches. She got transportation grants to bring their students, many Latino and African American, to the

JOVELLE TAMAYO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Shamay Thomas, 49, a nurse practitioner and outdoor enthusiast, explores Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Wash.

“We deserve to be in these spaces as much as anyone else,” she said of people of color.

5,400-foot overlook where hiking trails cut through wildflower meadows. The spot is called Paradise.

With the Olympic Mountains on its western fringe and the Cascade Range to the east, the Seattle area is at the center of some of the most eye-popping landscape in the United States. Several million acres of wilderness lie within an easy drive, and in recent years, the increasingly crowded trails here have also begun to reflect a growing diversity — despite Seattle being one of the least diverse major cities in the country.

That hasn’t happened just by chance.

A new wave of affinity groups and meetups for people of color have drawn growing numbers of trekkers, backpackers and outdoor enthusiasts. Facebook and Instagram posts feature photos of

Asian women scaling the rocky crags of Little Si in the central Cascades or black hikers celebrating at the summit of Mount St. Helens. Such images spur more interest while challenging the myth that only white people seek the great outdoors.

“We can’t continue to accept these fairy tales about things that black people don’t do, can’t do,” said Audrey Peterman, an African American environmental leader who, with her husband, wrote “Legacy on the Land” after exploring sites across the country.

“There’s been a lot of grass-roots work to create this change.”

And in response to the nation’s shifting demographics, major outdoor advocacy organizations and government agencies such as the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service are forging partnerships with schools, youth groups and these same affinity groups.

Together, they aim to reach communities that have been long ignored or underserved.

The issues involved have broad implications. The most diverse generation in history will help determine the future of this country’s open lands. Yet people who have not used them — who have never seen the vastness of the Grand Canyon, for example, or the towering dunes of Cape Cod’s national seashore — may feel little connection and lend little support.

There’s also a social- and environmental-justice argument for encouraging diversity, noted Tom Vogl, chief executive of The Mountaineers. The century-old conservation and education club, which has members across the Pacific Northwest, offers classes in a range of activities. Those have included workshops for young women, many of them immigrants and women of color.

“These places that we’ve grown to love and that have become such a part of our identity . . . everyone should have an opportunity to experience them,” Vogl said. “They shouldn’t be just for white people or people of privilege or wealthy

people.”

Part of the national parks’ problem around access and equity is rooted in history. Often lost in the official narrative were stories about Native Americans’ connection to these treasured sites, or about the role of the Buffalo Soldiers, African American regiments in the U.S. Army who were among the original park rangers in locations such as Yosemite and Sequoia.

A childhood of camping and hiking was what hooked 49-yearold Shamay Thomas, although it was on land her father’s family owned in Eastern Washington.

Her interest turned urban after her parents divorced and her mother moved her and her siblings back to Seattle. As a young adult, she returned to the mountains to seek the solace she had always found there, she said.

About a decade ago, she recalls, hardly any people of color were on the trails. She began noticing a change about five years ago, and she still jokes about her excitement in seeing a cluster of other black hikers — and literally chasing them down to ask them who they were.

“We deserve to be in these spaces as much as anyone else,” she said recently.

Black People Hike, the Seattlearea group Thomas discovered that day, was started by some friends chatting over dinner about why there were so few African Americans on wilderness trails.

The Facebook group they formed began slowly, co-founder Dorian Waller said, then hit 500 members. That number has now topped 2,000 — inspiring a sister organization in Phoenix.

Dieu Nguyen belongs to the group and to Hikers of Color, which allows her to plan treks with others when she travels out of town. For her, the hiking groups provide an opportunity to network but also guarantee natural allies. “It’s a way to keep yourself safe on the trails.” n ©The Washington Post

14 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018 23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Anger BY

S ORAYA C HEMALY

Anger is all the rage right now. The rate of anger “reactions” on polit­ ical Facebook posts is rising rapidly. Among women, TV shows like “Dietland,” “Jessica Jones” and “Sharp Objects” — as well as real­ world #MeToo headlines — demand comeuppance for decades of in­ justice. But these powerful feelings are still poorly understood. Here are five of the most intransigent myths.

MYTH NO. 1 Men are angrier than women.

Research consistently shows that men are no more likely than women to be angry. In fact, women report feeling anger more frequently and in more sustained ways. In early 2016, for example, a national survey conducted by Esquire and NBC found that women reported consistently higher rates of anger. Another, conducted by Elle magazine two years later, revealed the same pattern.

The myth of gendered anger begins with children as young as 3 or 4. A 2011 meta-analysis of research on children’s emotional expression found that adult biases strongly influence how we think about gender and anger: Adults are more likely to describe infants they think are boys as agitated and disagreeable.

MYTH NO. 2 ‘Venting’ makes you feel better.

Physical aggression and hostility are often thought of as release mechanisms for anger.

The Anger Room in Dallas gives customers a baseball bat and a room full of junk. People sign up for combat sports like kickboxing and practice “medicine ball slams” to release rage and reduce stress.

The problem is that “destruction therapy,” as it has been called, doesn’t help and could actually upset you more, according to research. One study concluded that it “may be worse than useless.” Trying to get anger “out” in these ways has been

shown to lead to increases in aggressive behavior and ruminating, an unhelpful process in which anger can loop in on itself, causing further aggravation and obsessive thoughts. Even verbally letting off steam, by complaining in dribs and drabs or dashing off some online snark, doesn’t bring catharsis. Research shows that the more a person “vents” in these ways, the more they report having had a bad day.

Psychologist Brad J. Bushman, for example, concluded that venting increases anger and aggression.

After studying the emotional responses of people using punching bags to exorcise their rage, he concluded that “doing nothing at all was more effective.”

relationship between anger and chronic pain found that patients who expressed their anger constructively experienced “greater improvement in control over pain and depressed mood.”

Studies suggest a strong association between improved emotional regulation and lower cardiovascular and cancer mortality rates.

MYTH NO. 3 ‘Anger management’ means stifling explosive rage.

The “self-silencing” of anger has been studied for decades, and it is clearly implicated in depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm and suicide.

An inability to express anger also affects relationships, inhibiting, for example, intimacy. The best kind of “management” is the kind that channels feelings, rather than bottling them up. Among the best approaches, according to psychologists and researchers, is to write about what is making you angry and engage in constructive conversations with people who can address your concerns and help solve problems. Such methods are directly tied to better health outcomes. A 2008 study of the

MYTH NO. 4 Black women are especially angry.

This is a trope. A 2009 study found that black women exhibited no more or less anger than a control group. And in that Esquire-NBC survey, 56 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics reported getting angry at least once a day, compared with 73 percent of whites. Fiftyeight percent of white women said they’d experienced increasing anger over the course of the previous year; only 44 percent of nonwhite women said the same.

Microaggressions against black women do appear to raise stress and anger, but, largely because of experience in navigating that form of discrimination, black women are

DRANTE/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

The problem with anger isn’t that we have it, but how we deal with it.

more likely to suppress displays of anger to avoid being penalized for seeming emotional and irrational.

MYTH NO. 5 Anger is destructive.

Having the feelings isn’t the problem; it’s what we do about them. The American Psychological Association points out that “anger is a completely normal, usually healthy, human emotion” that “turns destructive” when it’s not acknowledged, not understood. Anger can be channeled productively and creatively, often with powerful and lasting effects. For instance, after the Ku Klux Klan bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, singer Nina Simone was overcome with shock and rage. She channeled it into one of the most moving and influential protest songs of the 20th century.

Today, anger at social injustice is fueling massive social movements in the United States and abroad. n Chemaly is the director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and author of “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger.” This was written for The Washington Post.

15 17

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

PSYCHOLOGY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Study: Some people are just jerks BY

B EN G UARINO

P

ersonality tests are hugely popular, though if you ask working psychologists, they’ll tell you the results are little better than astrological signs. But a new study, based on huge sets of personality data representing 1.5 million people, has persuaded one of the staunchest critics of personality tests to conclude that maybe distinct personality types exist, after all.

In a report published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois identify four personality types: reserved, role models, average and self-centered.

The new approach was nothing like the basis for widely used personality tests such as the MyersBriggs, which spits out a personality type with acronyms like INTJ, for introversion-intuition-thinking-judgment, or ESFP (that’s extrovert-sensing-feeling-perceiving).

“The social psychology community is pretty in line with being anti-Myers-Briggs Type personality assessments,” said Alexander Swan, a psychologist at Eureka College in Illinois who is a critic of the test.

That test, developed in the 1940s, is based on Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s idea that people can be grouped into archetypes.

(These archetypes weren’t empirical findings, just Jung’s assessment of literary motifs and his observations of the people he knew.) Myers-Briggs tests generate one of 16 archetypes for each user, but the questions are poorly written, Swan said. And several studies show that the personality types are inconsistent and cannot predict career success or other characteristics.

People been trying to stuff each other into categorical bins for thousands of years. “These ideas go back to the ancient Greeks like Hippocrates and so on,” said Martin Gerlach, a postdoctoral researcher who studies complex systems at Northwestern University.

Gerlach and his colleagues Luís

ISTOCK

Scientists using a sophisticated psychological algorithm have identified four personality types A. Nunes Amaral and Beatrice Farb are trying to propel these old ideas into the realm of big data.

They took a relatively new approach — not adhering to Jungian theories but analyzing four huge data sets.

They also enlisted the aid of Northwestern psychologist William Revelle, who been an outspoken skeptic of the idea of personality types. He was, at first, a critic of the group’s own study.

Social psychologists dispute whether personality types exist.

Traits are another matter. Personality traits “can be measured consistently across ages, across cultures,” said Amaral, co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. The five bestestablished traits, or Big Five, are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Swan agreed that the Big Five is “a well done model.” Long questionnaires, typically of 100 ques-

tions or more, identify whether people score low or high on these traits.

The results give a value for each of the five traits, indicating that a person is high on agreeableness, for instance, or low on neuroticism. The scientists used a sophisticated machine learning algorithm to identify clusters of traits, or what Revelle called “lumps in the batter,” in this 5-D population.

On the first attempt, Amaral said he got it completely wrong.

Revelle shot the artificial personality types down. They doublechecked the model, and the psychologist was correct.

The scientists eventually developed a more robust model to pick out the smaller groupings (like “role model” and “self-centered”) and keep the biggest one (“average”) intact. Revelle asked them to apply the tool to two additional sets of personality trait data. They found four types here, too.

That ultimately convinced Rev-

“Personality changes, very slowly, over time in the direction of greater maturity.”

John A. Johnson, a Pennsylvania State University psychologist

elle — the four personality types appeared as anticipated wherever they looked. In total, this research represents personality traits for 1.5 million people from the United States and England.

The new study “presents a very strong case for personality types defined by configurations of the Big-Five personality traits,” said John A. Johnson, a Pennsylvania State University psychologist.

Johnson has collected personality trait data from more than 500,000 people. He made these data sets available to the study authors but was not otherwise involved with this research.

Amaral and his colleagues named the clusters only after the clusters were located. Role models were high in every trait but neuroticism. They also appeared with increasing frequency as people aged. “These people are not mean, not rude, but kind and polite and treat people with respect,” Amaral said. The reserved type was not open and not particularly extroverted, but otherwise agreeable and conscientious.

People who scored very high in extroversion but were below average in agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness were “selfcentered.” Amaral put it in a “nontechnical way”: Some people are “jerks.” Teenage males were more likely than average to be selfcentered, but this proportion decreased with age.

Johnson said he was not surprised by the connections between personality type, age and gender.

“Personality changes, very slowly, over time in the direction of greater maturity: greater agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability,” he said.

Revelle said he is confident these types exist, but he’s not sure what to take away from that observation. “What’s the actual utility of these?” he said. “I don’t think we’ve really addressed that.”

Not yet, anyway. Revelle is collecting personality trait data at the SAPA-Project.org. And Gerlich wants to investigate whether the people they called “role models” are more successful in their jobs. n ©The Washington Post

16

SUNDAY, September, 23, 2018

Want more good reads?

Check out these popular publications from The Wenatchee World.

Foothills Magazine

Wenatchee Valley Business World

A bi-monthly lifestyle magazine about North Central Washington.

The region’s leading business magazine.

OF NORTH CEN u AND ALL

ON TRAL WASHINGT

s l l i h t o o

WENATCHEE

u

u CHE LAN LEAVENWORTH

r 2018 September-Octobe

The Wine issue

Wine & 2018 Wenatchee e th om fr rs ne Win n ine Competitio Food Festival W

Read online at

Wen atch ee Vall ey

YOUR FAMILY- OWN

ED BUSINES S MAG

AZINE

d l r o w s s e n i s Bu 8 | $2 SEP TEMBER 201

READY FOR

TAKEOFF

AC E RE OF TH IS PL A BOOKSTOSEE PAGE 3

PA NGBORN TOOW THE BAY AREA : ‘N GINS’ HA RD PA RT BE SE E PAGE 16

R DAMS : KE EPING OU KRIS JOH NSONSEE PAGE 8

RS TING SPONSO RLD’S PRESEN BUSINESS WO

Read online at

ncwfoothills.com/digital/

wvbusinessworld.com/digital/

No subscription required.

No subscription required.