The Washington Post National Weekly - Nov. 29, 2015

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FORCED REFORMS, MIXED RESULTS Federal interventions at troubled police departments across the country drag on for years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars PAGE 12

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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Seven with a chance BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

F

or all the candidates, all the debates and all the unpredictability, the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 has taken a clear shape over the past month or so.

There is a four-candidate top tier that has separated itself from the rest of the pack.

There is then a trio of “if/then” candidates who would need a major mistake or collapse from one of the top four to have a realistic chance at winning. Everyone else running has a puncher’s chance — at best — at being relevant in the nomination fight.

Below are my rankings of the candidates who can still make a plausible case for being the nominee. The top-ranked candidate is the one most likely to be the GOP nominee.

7. Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor has (finally) moved beyond Bridgegate, allowing his natural skills as a candidate to shine through. He has focused heavily on New Hampshire throughout the campaign, a smart move given that Iowa’s caucuses have been less than predictive in the past two Republican presidential nomination fights. Christie still needs a stumble or two by the establishment types in front of him, but he has fought his way back to respectability.

6. John Kasich. The Ohio governor is in a similar place to Christie, putting a huge emphasis on New Hampshire in hopes of a breakthrough in a state known for rewarding more moderate types. Kasich’s numbers in New Hampshire are slightly better than Christie’s, which is why he is ranked slightly higher, but some of that is simply the residual effect of a major TV push his super PAC made in the state a few months back.

KLMNO WEEKLY

5. Jeb Bush. The former Florida governor took just 6 percent of the national vote in a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday, his worst showing in the survey in two years. What he has going for him is what he has always had: money. His super PAC remains well stocked, although the fact that $20 million has been spent on his behalf on TV ads in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina without moving his numbers in any sort of positive way should be a big concern for his campaign.

4. Ben Carson. For the briefest of moments, the retired neurosurgeon was the front-runner for the GOP nod. But Carson has slipped from that perch largely because of self-inflicted errors, including a national security adviser to his campaign acknowledging to the New York Times that the doctor simply doesn’t get it when it comes to foreign policy. That plus Carson’s struggles in debates to demonstrate know-how on world affairs have raised questions about his readiness for the top office. His strong — and largely unwavering — support among social conservatives still make Carson dangerous, however, particularly in Iowa.

3. Ted Cruz. The senator from Texas continues to run the best campaign of anyone in the field. He has carefully avoided alienating supporters of Carson and Donald Trump in hopes that if and when the two political newcomers flame out, he will be the natural receptacle for their supporters.

Cruz also has a conglomerate of well-funded super PACs that will be able to make the case for him (and against his opponents) between now and March. His biggest problem is that no

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 7

matter how many mistakes and misstatements Carson and Trump make, their supporters stand by them.

2. Donald Trump. In the Post-ABC poll, the real estate mogul wins about 1 in 3 GOP primary voters and has a double-digit edge on his next closest rival, Carson. In Iowa, Trump is in first, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, although Carson keeps it competitive. Trump remains ahead by a wide margin in New Hampshire. No one else in the field is in that strong a position in the first two voting states. And, as a billionaire, Trump can simply cut himself a check for any amount at any time in the next few months. Running counter to all that is Trump’s seeming intention to push the boundaries on every issue, including immigration and national security. That tendency should eventually catch up with him, although he has resisted the political rules of gravity for months.

1. Marco Rubio. The senator from Florida is the most complete candidate in the field today. He is a skilled debater. His personal story is compelling and well told. He has positioned himself solidly in third place nationally without spending heavily from his own coffers or running the risk of peaking too early. Rubio’s biggest problems are basic ones: money and organization. His haul in the third fundraising quarter — $6 million — was far less than someone in his position could be expected to bring in. And his early-state voterID and turnout operations are less far along than those of Trump and Bush. Still, if you were betting today, you would bet on Rubio. n Cillizza writes “The Fix,” a politics blog .

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ENVIRONMENT BOOKS OPINION TRENDS

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ON THE COVER Cadets stand at attention as they learn proper form for marching at the Colegio Universitario de Justicia Criminal in Gurabo, Puerto Rico, in August.

Photograph by JABIN BOTSFORD, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

In Michigan, tensions fester over faith S ARAH P ULLIAM B AILEY Hamtramck, Mich.

BY

K

aren Majewski was in such high demand in her vintage shop on a recent Saturday afternoon that a store employee threw up her hands when yet another visitor came in to chat. Everyone wanted to talk to the mayor about the big political news.

Earlier this month, the bluecollar city that has been home to Polish Catholic immigrants and their descendents for more than a century became what demographers think is the first jurisdiction in the nation to elect a majorityMuslim council.

It’s the second tipping for Hamtramck (pronounced Hamtram-ik), which in 2013 earned the distinction of becoming what appears to be the first majorityMuslim city in the United States after the arrival of thousands of immigrants from Yemen, Bangladesh and Bosnia over a decade.

In many ways, Hamtramck is a microcosm of the fears gripping parts of the country since the Islamic State’s attacks on Paris: The influx of Muslims here has profoundly unsettled some residents of the town long known for its love of dancing, beer, paczki pastries and the pope.

“It’s traumatic for them,” said Majewski, a dignified-looking woman in a brown velvet dress, her long, silvery hair wound in a loose bun.

Majewski, whose family emigrated from Poland in the early 20th century, admitted to a few concerns of her own. Business owners within 500 feet of one of Hamtramck’s four mosques can’t obtain a liquor license, she complained, a notable development in a place that flouted Prohibitionera laws by openly operating bars.

The restrictions could thwart efforts to create an entertainment hub downtown, said the procommerce mayor.

And while Majewski advocated to allow mosques to issue calls to prayer, she understands why some longtime residents are struggling to adjust to the sound that echoes

SALWAN GEORGES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Long a Polish Catholic enclave, one city has become majority-Muslim through the city’s streets five times each day.

“There’s definitely a strong feeling that Muslims are the other,” she said. “It’s about culture, what kind of place Hamtramck will become. There’s definitely a fear, and to some degree, I share it.”

Saad Almasmari, a 28-year-old from Yemen who became the fourth Muslim elected to the sixmember city council this month, doesn’t understand that fear.

Almasmari, the owner of an ice cream company who campaigned on building Hamtramck’s struggling economy and improving the public schools, said he is frustrated that so many residents expect the council’s Muslim members to

be biased. He spent months campaigning everywhere in town, knocking on the doors of mosques and churches alike, he said.

“I don’t know why people keep putting religion into politics,” said Almasmari, who received the highest percentage of votes (22 percent) of any candidate. “When we asked for votes, we didn’t ask what their religion was.”

Past clashes with present Surrounded by Detroit, Hamtramck is Michigan’s most densely populated city, with about 22,000 residents occupying row after row of two-story, turn-ofthe-century bungalows packed into two square miles. Polish Cath-

A Muslim woman looks at New Palace Bakery’s display in Hamtramck, Mich.

Thousands of immigrants from Yemen, Bangladesh and Bosnia have arrived in the city in the past decade.

olic immigrants began flocking to Hamtramck, which was originally settled by German farmers, in 1914 when the Dodge brothers opened an auto assembly plant in town.

While the city’s Polish Catholic population has shrunk from 90 percent in 1970 to about 11 percent today, in part as the old residents have moved to more prosperous suburbs, Polish American culture still permeates the town.

Labor Day, known as Polish Day here, is marked with music, drinking and street dancing. The roof of the Polish cathedral-style St. Florian Church peaks above the city landscape, and a large statue of Pope John Paul II, who visited the city in 1987, towers over Pope Park

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

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POLITICS

Tensions rise in volume Many longtime residents point to 2004 as the year they suspected that the town’s culture had shifted irrevocably. It was then that the city council gave permission to al-Islah Islamic Center to broadcast its call to prayer from speakers atop its roof.

“The Polish people think we were invading them,” said Masud Khan, one of the mosque’s leaders, recalling that time in an interview earlier this month. “We were a big threat to their religion and culture. Now their days are gone.”

The mosque, which attracts about 500 people for its Friday prayer services, has purchased a neighboring vacant limestone building in the heart of the city that once was a furniture store. The mosque’s leaders plan to put a minaret — a spire — on the building

A contrasting city within a city: Hamtramck, Mich.

Compared with surrounding Detroit, Hamtramck is densely populated and has fairly low median household incomes. It also has a high percentage of foreign-born residents, many of whom immigrated from Yemen, Bangladesh and Bosnia.

75

94

Highland Hamtramck Park 96

Detroit M I C H.

Det ro

on Joseph Campau Avenue. The Polish pope’s cousin, John Wojtylo, was a Hamtramck city councilman in the 1940s and 1950s, according to local historian Greg Kowalski.

The once-thriving factory town now struggles with one of the highest poverty rates in Michigan. In 2009, American Axle shut down its plant in Hamtramck, laying off hundreds of workers. There is a new class of entrepreneurs, including Igor Sadikovic, a young Bosnian immigrant who plans to open a coffee shop with an art gallery by next summer, and Rebecca Smith, who owns a handbag store that employs Muslim women.

But the new businesses have not been enough to offset the loss of a manufacturing base and reductions in state revenue sharing.

Since 2000, Michigan has twice appointed an emergency manager to the city, which has an annual operating budget of $22 million.

Hamtramck’s exceedingly low home prices and relatively low crime rate have proved especially attractive to new immigrants, whose presence is visible everywhere. Most of the women strolling Joseph Campau Avenue wear hijabs, or headscarves, and niqabs, veils that leave only the area around the eyes open. Many of the markets advertise their wares in Arabic or Bengali, and some display signs telling customers that owners will return shortly — gone to pray, much in the same way Polish businesses once signaled that employees had gone to Mass.

it

er Riv

U.S. CAN.

ONTARIO 1 mile

Population 0

1,973

3,409

6,000

Hamtramck’s population of 22,258 is about 3 percent of Detroit’s population of 706,663. However, Hamtramck has more than twice as many people per square mile than Detroit, as the city’s population is packed into 2.1 square miles.

Median household income 0

19K

32K

$100K

The average household income for Hamtramck is $25,659. This is about 2.5 percent less than Detroit’s median household income of $26,325.

Foreign-born residents* 0

15

37

93 100%

More than 44 percent of Hamtramck’s population is foreign-born, compared with Detroit’s average of 5.1 percent.

Residents from Asia* 0

18.5

45

73

100%

About 30 percent of Hamtramck’s population is from south-central or western Asia. The countries with the highest percentage of immigrants to the city are Bangladesh and Yemen, with 15 percent and 14 percent, respectively. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Poland follow with five and 3.5 percent, respectively. *Only census tracts with a population of more than 50 are mapped.

Sources: U.S. Census American Community Survey 5-year, 2013; U.S. Census American Community Survey 3-year, 2013 DENISE LU AND TED MELLNIK/THE WASHINGTON POST

and use it to continue broadcasting a call to prayer five times a day.

The private sale enraged city leaders, including the mayor, who sees the area as key to commercial

growth. Mosque leaders estimate that the 20,000-square-foot building will hold up to 2,000 people once the renovation is finished next year.

The town’s transformation caught Mike Bugaj off guard.

When the Hamtramck native left to join the Air Force in 1972, the city was widely referred to as “Little Warsaw.” When he returned from the military in 1995, “the Muslims were here,” said Bugaj, who is of Polish and Native American descent.

The new majority Muslim council has Bugaj worried that old traditions, like the Polish festival and Fat Tuesday’s paczki day, soon will be wiped away.

He and other residents are “concerned about what they would want to change, that they could mistreat women,” said Bugaj, who wore feather earrings and a T-shirt with wolves on it. “Don’t come over to America and try to turn people to your way of thinking.”

Wayne Little, who has been a pastor for nearly 40 years at Corinthian Baptist Church, said many of the city’s African American residents are also waiting to see whether the new Muslim-majority city council will represent their interests.

“They are clannish and stick together. . . . The jury is out on them,” Little said.

But Hamtramck’s Muslim population is hardly a monolith — the city is about 23 percent Arabic, 19 percent Bangladeshi and 7 percent Bosnian. The predominantly Muslim groups don’t intermingle much because of language differences, according to Thaddeus Radzilowski of the Piast Institute, a census information center.

Adding to the city’s burgeoning diversity are the young, white hipsters who have begun to migrate here from surrounding areas for the food, bars and art shows.

Even some residents who are nervous about the new council speak of the city’s diversity with pride, noting the eclectic mix of restaurants and the fact that at least 27 languages are spoken in Hamtramck schools.

Frank Zacharias, an elderly Polish American usher at St. Ladislaus, the Catholic parish across the street from the mosque, is intimately familiar with life on Hamtramck’s streets, which he tromped for 28 years as a mail carrier before retiring. The changes have stunned him, he said.

“It was hard at the beginning,” he said, referring to 2004, when continues on next page

KLMNO WEEKLY

Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski says,

“There’s definitely a strong feeling that Muslims are the other.

It’s about culture, what kind of place Hamtramck will become.”

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POLITICS

from previous page

the mosque began the call to prayer.

But, he added: “They’re human.

You gotta live with them.

Hamtramck is known for diversity.”

Unneighborly acts As he sat in a Yemeni restaurant neatly dressed in a blue dress shirt and dark blue striped tie, Almasmari, the council member, recalled feeling shaken in the weeks leading up to the election, when he discovered that dozens of the yard signs touting his candidacy had been spray-painted with an “X.” On a boarded-up building on the city’s main street, a poster to reelect council member Anam Miah had been partially covered with big block letters — “DON’T VOTE” — and a swastika was drawn on Miah’s forehead.

But Almasmari insists that long-timers’ fears are unfounded.

Already, he said, he has scheduled a meeting with residents who wish to talk about their concerns — economic, educational and otherwise.

“People talk about Muslims by talking about ‘them,’ but we’re not going to be as single-minded as people think,” said Almasmari, a married father of three who covered his Facebook profile picture recently with the French flag filter.

Back in her vintage shop down the block, Majewski said she sympathizes with the stories of immigrants in search of a better life. It is a subject the mayor knows something about, having specialized in immigration and ethnicity when she earned her doctorate in American culture at the University of Michigan, said Majewski, who works at UM’s Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy.

A few minutes later, she pointed to a large, vacant building down the street that she said had once housed a popular department store. It was purchased by a Yemeni immigrant and has sat empty for two years, she said.

“It creates a lot of resentment and drags down the property values. That’s a real source of tension,” Majewski said. “Is that ethnic? . . . What do you call that? Can you criticize his lack of action?

There’s certainly an ethnic element, the feeling that they don’t care about the city. How do you disentangle those?” n

Immigration issues at heart of Trump’s staying power B Y J IM T ANKERSLEY AND S COTT C LEMENT

A

lmost half of Republican voters favor deporting all immigrants here illegally and barring Syrian refugeesfromenteringtheUnitedStates — a fact that helps explain Donald Trump’s resilient campaign for the party’s presidential nomination.

Trump first shot to the top of the GOP field by appealing to economically anxious voters who blame illegal immigration for pushing down their wages and reducing job opportunities. After this month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, which could have made his lack of foreign policy experience a liability with voters, Trump has drawn large crowds and loud applause by calling for the United States to reject refugees from Syria.

Data from a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll suggest those issues — immigrants and refugees — differentiate Trump supporters from other Republicans. Nearly half of GOP-leaning respondents in the poll — 47 percent — both support the deportation of undocumented immigrants and oppose accepting refugees from Syria. If a GOP-leaning voter supports deportation, there is a 79 percent chance she or he also opposes Syrian refugees, compared with 54 percent if they oppose deportation.

Trump has captured the support of 51 percent of those overlapping voters, compared with 16 percent among all other Republican voters.

Perhaps as important for Trump, his two leading rivals from the establishment wing of the party fare quite poorly with the antiimmigration/refugee group — which, again, appears to comprise nearly half the GOP electorate. Jeb Bush polls at 6 percent with that group. Marco Rubio at 5 percent.

Ben Carson at 19 percent; if Trump could woo all those Carson voters his way, he’d be within shouting difference of an outright majority in the primary field.

Anti-immigrant/refugee voters

Trump support aligns with support for deportation, opposition to refugees Among each group, percentage of Republican-leaning registered voters who support Trump for the party’s nomination

SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST-ABC NEWS POLL NOV. 16-19

cross traditional Republican constituencies — 32 percent identify as “very conservative,” but 39 percent say they are moderate or liberal (similar to other Republicans). Just over one-third are white bornagain Protestants, identical to the share other Republicans. They differ in their level of education — 48 percent have a high school degree or less, compared with 33 percent of other Republicans.

Trump is also running well ahead among voters who say the most important attribute in a candidate is her or his likelihood of bringing needed change to Washington. Some of his opponents, such as Bush, have attempted to cast themselves as agents of change, though of a different sort than Trump. The poll offers some cautions on that strategy, for candidates (such as Bush) who break from Trump on the deportation and refugee issues.

Fifty-two percent of Republican-leaning adults say it’s most important for them to support the candidate who is likeliest to bring needed change to Washington, compared with 28 percent who prioritize honesty, 11 percent experience, 4 percent electability and 2 percent personality and temperament.

Of those who prioritize change, 67 percent support deportation and 74 percent oppose Middle

THE WASHINGTON POST

Eastern refugees, both higher than among Republicans who prioritize other attributes (46 and 62 percent, respectively).

Other Republicans still have several paths to beat out Trump. A rival candidate could consolidate the support of GOP voters who oppose deportation and/or support refugees. Carson or, perhaps, Ted Cruz could find a way to steal Trump’s voters from the deport/no refugee group. Looked at another way, the less politically troublesome opposition to refugees might serve as an opportunity for establishment Republicans to connect with these voters without staking out strong opposition to welcoming undocumented immigrants.

Or any candidate could find another issue to overwhelm Trump among white Republicans without a college degree, the voters most likely to both support deportation and oppose refugees. That issue would have to be more important to those voters than immigration and migration concerns.

Which almost certainly means it would need to speak directly to their economic anxiety, which helped lift Trump’s candidacy in the first place.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted Nov. 16-19 among a random national sample 1,004 adults reached on cellular and land line phones by live interviewers. n

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A Southern prize for GOP candidates

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND R OBERT C OSTA

Mobile, Ala.

B

en Carson journeyed here the other week to the buckle of the Bible Belt, where he proclaimed America a “Judeo-Christian nation” and delivered a stern warning to his devoted followers: Show up at the polls on March 1 or face consequences.

On Nov. 21, Donald Trump again swooped into Alabama, where he has cultivated friendships with immigration hardliners, to rally fans in Birmingham. Sen. Marco Rubio has his eyes on the state, too, recently becoming one of only two candidates (Carson is the other) to submit a full slate of 76 delegates for its primary.

Then there’s Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, whose volunteers have been buzzing around Alabama gathering names of grass-roots opponents to the Common Core education standards. Cruz’s campaign bus planned to be parked at this weekend’s Alabama-Auburn football game with free stickers and literature. “The Iron Bowl is a big, big moment in Alabama, and Cruz people will be everywhere,” said Ann Eubank, Cruz’s state co-chair.

Alabama has become an unusual magnet for Republican presidential candidates because it is one of 11 mostly Southern states holding a primary or caucus on March 1 — the delegate bonanza known as Super Tuesday.

While the February states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — are expected to set the tone and winnow the field, Super Tuesday will arrive like a thunder clap, probably determining which pairings will survive for what could be a protracted battle for the nomination.

“It’s a huge delegate haul, and it’s either going to change the momentum coming out of the early states or reaffirm it,” said John Weaver, chief strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is building an Alabama coalition led by the state’s governor.

For centrist Republicans such as Kasich, the aim may not be so

MIKE STONE/REUTERS

Campaigns strategize to win as much of Super Tuesday’s delegate bonanza as possible much sweeping Super Tuesday as surviving it. After March 1, the calendar turns more to their liking, with a number of winnertake-all states in less conservative regions where suburban, business-friendly Republicans may matter more than evangelicals and tea-party activists.

For Trump and Carson, the outsiders who have dominated the race for months, Super Tuesday has long been seen by party operatives as the turning point when one of them could surge.

For Cruz, who has sought to appeal to many of the same voters as Trump and Carson, the Southern states are essential. He sees them as his best chance to leap ahead of his rivals after what could be a muddled field by late February. In Georgia, for instance, he has enlisted more than 100 county organizers and has volunteer chairs in all 14 congressional districts. The senator’s wife, Heidi, visited the Atlanta suburbs recently to talk up her husband’s candidacy to Republican women.

Super Tuesday has taken on the moniker SEC primary, a reference to college football’s Southeastern Conference, because of the many southern states at play: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

But other March 1 contests will test the candidates in different ways, such as primaries in Massachusetts and Vermont, both states where Republicans are marginalized but that feature strong conservative currents. Minnesota has a caucus that rewards field organizing, while Alaska is so remote that few candidates have campaigned there.

Securing the nomination is a matter of accumulating delegates, and far more are up for grabs on March 1 — 595 total — than in the four early states, which together have only 133 delegates, according to figures provided by the Republican National Committee.

Super Tuesday delegates are awarded proportionally, many of them by congressional district.

This gives lower-tier candidates

Ben Carson, right, chats with Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, at the North Texas Presidential Forum in Plano last month. Republican candidates are organizing and making appeals across the South in preparation for March 1 — Super Tuesday.

an opportunity to pick up delegates without winning the states outright, so long as their vote totals meet the minimum thresholds, which vary by state from 5 percent to 20 percent.

“Everyone feels like they can come in and leave with a few delegates, so we see an uptick in campaigning and organizing over the past few cycles,” said Brent Leatherwood, executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party.

Consider former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who is struggling nationally but hopes to win delegates by overperforming in the March 1 Southern states, many of which he carried in 2008.

“We’re focused on where we can get the most delegates, the biggest bang for the buck,” strategist Chip Saltsman said. “For example, in Texas, there are some rural congressional districts where if you go do a visit you might pick up more voters than if you were up on Dallas TV for a week.”

Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) also is vying for Texas — which his father, Ron, represented in Congress — but is concentrating on turning out young voters there and in other Southern states.

Carson’s playbook in Texas and other Southern states is to target majority African American congressional districts.

Trump’s operation has been putting him in front of raucous crowds in red and blue states, and he has been making frequent trips to Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, as well as Alabama, where in August he had one of his first mega-rallies in Mobile.

Alex Perch, 30, arrived three hours early for a Worcester, Mass., rally, wearing a camouflage hat embroidered with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and carrying the mogul’s latest book.

“It’s so weird,” Perch said of Trump campaigning in Massachusetts, the launching pad of moreestablishment candidates like 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney. But, he said, “Donald is doing unbelievable in Massachusetts. . . . If the moons on Jupiter align and this happens, it’s going to be wild.” n

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NATION

Helping drug users save one another L ENNY B ERNSTEIN Baltimore BY

D

eep into a three-day heroin binge at a local hotel, Samantha told the newbie he was shooting too much.

He wasn’t accustomed to heroin, she said, and hadn’t waited long enough since his last injection.

“But he didn’t listen,” she said.

Sure enough, he emerged from a visit to the bathroom, eyes glazed, and collapsed from an overdose.

Samantha, who declined to give her last name to avoid trouble with her bosses at a nearby strip club, said she grabbed her naloxone, the fast-acting antidote to opioid overdoses. She was too panicked to place the atomizer on the end of the syringe, but her boyfriend wasn’t. He sprayed the mist into the nose of the unconscious drug user, who awoke minutes later.

“I always have it because I’m scared to death,” said Samantha, who said she has been shooting heroin for 22 years. “I don’t want to be helpless.”

As the opioid epidemic has exploded in small towns and suburbs in recent years, officials have scrambled to put naloxone in the hands of drug users’ families and friends, and to make it more widely available by equipping police officers with the drug.

At the same time, thousands of lives are being saved by giving the antidote to drug users. More than 80 percent of overdose victims revived by “laypeople” were rescued by other users, most of them in the past few years, according to one national survey published in June.

Baltimore has trained 12,000 people on the streets to use naloxone in the past 11 years, 2,150 of them this year alone. “If someone is using a drug that could kill them, they should also have the antidote available,” said Leana Wen, the city’s health commissioner. Chicago, New York and San Francisco also hand out thousands of doses to drug users at little or no cost.

But the rising number of rescues also highlights the shortcomings of what is, at best, a stopgap effort. With treatment for addic-

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

As heroin and prescription opioid use rises, officials put antidote to overdoses in more hands tion available to a small portion of the people who need it, many people who survive overdoses return to drug use. Some first responders express frustration at reviving the same people again and again without hope of permanent change.

In Charleston, W.Va., where President Obama spoke about the opioid crisis last month and rescue personnelhavecarriednaloxonefor decades, Fire Capt. Mark Strickland said he has revived one 34-year-old man six times and other drug users three and four times each.

“I can’t just take everybody to the hospital,” Strickland said. “ . . . There has to be a ‘What next?’ ” The drug’s cost also is beginning to influence anti-heroin strategy. The price of a nasally administered dose of naloxone — often known by its brand name, Narcan — has quadrupled in two years or less in many places, to nearly $50. Federal, state and local officials are pressing for discounts

from Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, the only supplier of that form of the drug.

New York and Ohio have succeeded. In San Francisco, the major nonprofit distribution program for drug users has begun using cheaper injectable naloxone instead.

“No company should jeopardize the progress being made in tackling this emergency by overcharging for a critically important drug like naloxone,” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) said in a July letter to groups that represent U.S. mayors and counties.

Amphastar officials did not return e-mails and calls seeking comment on the price increases.

Deaths from heroin overdoses quadrupled to 8,260 between 2000 and 2013, according to the federal government, as did deaths from prescription opioids, which reached 16,235.

The number of people revived by

Nathan Fields, right, of the Baltimore City Health Department, trains Anthony Williams, 52, a squatter who lives with various substance abusers, on how to administer naloxone, the antidote for heroin and opiate overdoses.

naloxone is difficult to determine, but the Harm Reduction Coalition, a training and advocacy group, published a survey in June showing that 26,463 people had been revived by “laypersons” between 1996 and the first half of 2014.

Nearly 83 percent of those rescues were made by other drug users.

More than 8,000 people were revived in 2013 alone, according to the coalition’s data, which covers only half of the organizations that distribute naloxone. Almost 38,000 kits were handed out to laypeople that year. These rescue efforts overwhelmingly involve people who have taken heroin, not prescription drugs.

“Drug users are the primary witnesses to drug overdoses,” said Eliza Wheeler, program manager for the coalition’s drug overdose prevention and education effort in San Francisco, who compiled the report. “This was about putting the effective tool into people’s hands.”

Baltimore started handing out naloxone in 2004, mostly through its needle-exchange program, eight years after the approach was pioneered in Chicago. Baltimore now makes it available to all residents via a prescription signed by Wen, the health commissioner, who is a former emergency room doctor. Drugstores sell it for a dollar to anyone on Medicaid.

Naloxone hydrochloride has long been carried by rescue personnel and used in emergency rooms. It works only on opioid overdoses, reversing them by blocking the receptors in the brain where opiates attach. Overdose victims usually resume breathing and awaken within minutes.

Baltimore officials long ago rejected the notion that widespread distribution of naloxone encourages drug use by prompting recklessness among drug abusers. And they are not troubled about helping “frequent fliers,” because research and experience show that relapses are common, even with treatment.

“You want to keep the person alive,” said Derrick Hunt, director of the city’s Community Risk Reduction program, “until they make better choices.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

As audience grays, NPR on red alert BY

P AUL F ARHI

A

s NPR came of age in the 1980s, its audience matured with it. Three decades later, that is starting to look like a problem.

Many of the listeners who grew up with NPR are now reaching retirement age, leaving NPR with a challenge: How can it attract younger and middle-aged audiences — whose numbers are shrinking — to replace them?

NPR’s research shows a growing gulf in who is listening to the likes of “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” the daily news programs that have propelled public radio for more than 30 years. Morning listening has dropped 11 percent overall since 2010, according to Nielsen research that NPR has made public; afternoon listening is down 6 percent over the same period.

Perhaps more troubling are the broader demographic trends.

NPR’s signal has gradually been fading among the young. Listening among “Morning Edition’s” audience, for example, has declined 20 percent among people under 55 in the past five years. Listening for “All Things Considered” has dropped about 25 percent among those in the 45-to-54 segment.

The growth market? People over 65, who were increasing in the morning and afternoon hours.

The graying of NPR, and the declines overall, are potentially perilous to the public radio ecosystem. NPR, based in Washington, serves programs to nearly 900 “member” stations, which rely in large part on financial contributions from their listeners. The stations, in turn, kick back some of their pledge-drive dollars to NPR to license such programs as “Car Talk,” “Fresh Air” and “Morning Edition” (federal tax dollars supply only a small part of stations’ annual budgets, and virtually none of NPR’s).

But as audiences drift to newer on-demand audio sources such as podcasts and streaming, the bonds with local stations — and the contributions that come with them — may be fraying.

EVY MAGES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Younger listeners turn away from staples like ‘All Things Considered’ and ‘Morning Edition’ “It’s a problem, and no one has really figured out what to do about it,” said Jeff Hansen, the program director at Seattle public station KUOW (94.9 FM). He noted that public radio was invented by people in their 20s in the 1970s, largely at stations funded by colleges and universities. “What they didn’t realize at the time was that what they were inventing was programming for people like themselves — baby boomers with college degrees.”

That audience has largely stayed loyal. The median age of public radio listeners has roughly tracked the median age of baby boomers. The median NPR listener was 45 years old in 1995; now he or she is 54, according to Tom Thomas, co-chief executive of the Station Resource Group, a publicradio strategy and research consortium. “The [aging] trend has been gentle and continuous for the last 20 years,” he said.

To shore up its appeal to a younger crowd, NPR’s contempo-

rary managers say that they are going where younger ears are, both via digital technology and with programming that has younger people in mind. Although radio is still, by far, the dominant way to listen, NPR’s distribution chain now includes podcasts, Web text and streams, satellite broadcasting and social media.

Among its news initiatives, NPR in October and early November launched a series on the lives of 15-year-old girls around the world; it played on all of NPR’s news shows and on NPR.org. NPR also has attempted to foster a community of younger listeners through “Generation Listen,” a Web site that features audio and text stories, as well as news of community events hosted by young NPR listeners.

In more subtle changes, NPR added two new, younger hosts — Ari Shapiro and Kelly McEvers — to “All Things Considered” this summer, joining 68-year-old Rob-

NPR’s headquarters is in downtown Washington, D.C. As audiences move toward streaming and podcasts, the bonds with local stations — and the contributions that come with them — may be fraying.

ert Siegel. And it promoted Michel Martin, an African American woman who is the former host of “Tell Me More” (canceled last year) and now hosts “Weekend All Things Considered.”

Last year, the organization launched a mobile app, NPR One, that streams both national and local public-radio stories via smartphones and tablets. NPR said downloads of the app have been growing, but it hasn’t released figures (notably, “Serial” — the massively popular and critically praised podcast — was produced not by NPR but by an independent public-radio organization, Chicago Public Media’s “This American Life”).

“If someone has decided that their phone is a better way to get information than their radio, we’re not going to change their mind,” said Oreskes, a former New York Times and Associated Press editor. “So our goal is to be there for them, wherever they are.”

Overall, audiences are growing on digital devices, said Emma Carrasco, NPR’s senior vice president for audience development. She estimated that 32 million people per week, about 1 in 10 people in the nation, hear or read (via NPR.org) something NPR has produced.

But it is unclear whether digital sources can fully replace the declining broadcast radio audience.

What’s more, NPR has to strike a sometimes awkward balance with its digital forays. By sending its programs directly to listeners via digital means, it risks bypassing and even competing with the stations that broadcast those shows — and supply the dollars that enable NPR to produce them in the first place.

“If I love [an NPR program] and I happen to be in the car, I may send money to my local station to thank them for the content,” says Larry Rosin, president of Edison Research, which analyzes audience data. “If I listen to the same program [via non-broadcast sources], who do I give money to?

It does tend to break the logical chain” of contributions. “That’s what happens when an industry is disrupted.” n

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WORLD

Is rise of Latin America’s left over?

BY J OSHUA P ARTLOW AND I RENE C ASELLI

Buenos Aires

T

he stereotypical Latin American leader of the past generation has been a firebrand populist who could deliver hours-long impromptu speeches on television, painted the United States as the source of all evil and had probably fought as a guerrilla in some steamy jungle.

That type of leader — think Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (minus the guerrilla experience) — is the opposite of Mauricio Macri, the understated engineer and incumbent Buenos Aires mayor who was elected president of Argentina last Sunday.

Macri’s win comes as further evidence that the often-cited “pink tide” of the Latin American left has started to ebb. Across the region, countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela that had joined forces to oppose the United States and “neoliberal” capitalism have seen their influence diminish as they battle economic challenges.

The severe slump driven by low oil and commodity prices in the region’s leader and biggest economy, Brazil, has pushed ratings for President Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla, into the single digits amid calls for her impeachment.

Nicaragua’s socialist exSandinista guerrilla leader, Daniel Ortega, is pro-business and beloved by Washington. Cuba is forging a rapprochement with the United States. A comedian with no political experience was just elected in Guatemala. Former Uruguayan president José Mujica, an ex-guerrilla famed for his ascetic lifestyle and liberal policies such as legalizing marijuana, was replaced by Tabaré Vázquez, a doctor. While support remains strong across the region for generous spending on social programs, the tone of the discourse has softened.

“You’re seeing this wave or tide or whatever you want to call it has run its course. They don’t have the economic sustenance to contin-

CAMBIEMOS PARTY VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Economic challenges have led to a changing guard for countries once run by populists ue,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.

“This kind of fiery leftist rhetoric was a function of the economic situation, and that has changed dramatically for many of these countries.”

In Macri’s first step as president-elect, a low-key Monday morning news conference at a table flanked by his aides, he said he would seek to suspend Venezuela from the South American trade bloc Mercosur, citing human rights violations and limits on free speech. That represents a sharp break with Fernández, the outgoing president, who has had close relations with Venezuela.

“To the brothers of Latin America and the whole world, we want to have a good relationship with all the countries,” Macri said in his

victory speech. “The Argentine people have much to offer to the world.”

Macri comes across as a calm, fact-favoring engineer more interested in quietly tinkering with economic levers than addressing the masses in soaring palace-balcony speeches. His aides describe him as a shy, somewhat socially awkward man who took a while to adapt to the crowds on the campaign trail. Macri was no student militant in the Latin American mode; he has said he doesn’t even regularly read newspapers.

His appeal stems in part from his lack of a strong ideology — a sharp contrast to Fernández’s fierce nationalism. Macri, a scion of one of the country’s richest families, headed the soccer team Boca Juniors and is serving his second term as mayor of Buenos Aires, where he is known for

Mauricio Macri, Argentina's conservative president-elect, promised a “marvelous” new era was starting for the country after he won a runoff election on Sunday.

sprucing up the capital, bringing in art and music performances and adding bus lanes.

“He’s the anti-Cristina,” said Diego Guelar, a foreign policy adviser to Macri. “He’s a doer. That would be exactly his ideology.”

Roberto Digon, who served alongside Macri at Boca Juniors before the two fell out over sales of players, said that Macri initially had trouble giving a speech or getting his ideas across but that he improved over time, in part because he wanted “to show his father that he was an important and capable person.”

“He must have undertaken some public speaking and presentation courses, because he was very weak politically and ideologically,” Digon said. “Macri was brilliant when it came to business.

He was very capable. He learned about politics little by little.”

Guelar, a former Argentine ambassador to the United States and a potential candidate for foreign minister, said Macri’s first foreign policy priority would be building closer ties with Brazil, a neighbor and trading partner that Macri on Monday called “our most important partner of the future.” The incoming president’s team also wants to pursue a free-trade deal with the European Union. Another goal is to clarify some aspects of the relationship with China, including making public the terms of the Chinese-funded space observatory — to ensure that it won’t have any military use — and reviewing a plan for a Chinese-built nuclear reactor.

As far as the United States is concerned, Macri seeks to settle a creditor dispute over debts from the financial crisis and cultivate a warmer overall relationship including encouraging foreign investment.

Macri’s chief strategist and campaign manager, Marcos Peña, added in an interview that “there are no reasons for us to have bad relations with the United States.”

“There can be a mature relationship of friendship, with a joint agenda to exchange and grow together,” he said. “The world is an opportunity, not a threat.” n

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Many electric cars really run on coal M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM Rotterdam BY

I

n this traffic-packed Dutch city, electric cars jostle for space at charging stations.

The oldest exhaust-spewing vehicles will soon be banned from the city center. Thanks to generous tax incentives, the share of electric vehicles has grown faster in the Netherlands than in nearly any other country in the world.

But behind the green growth is a filthy secret: In a nation famous for its windmills, electricity is coming from a far dirtier source.

Three new coal-fired power plants, including two here on the Rotterdam harbor, are supplying much of the power to fuel the Netherlands’ electric-car boom.

As the world tries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and combat climate change, policymakers have pinned hopes on electric cars, whose range and convenience are quickly improving.

Alongside the boom has come a surging demand for power to charge the vehicles, which can consume as much electricity in a single charge as the average refrigerator does in a month and a half.

The global shift to electric cars has a clear climate benefit in regions that get most of their power from clean sources, such as California or Norway. But in areas supplied by dirtier power, like China, India and even the Netherlands, which is on track to miss ambitious emissions targets set for 2020, the electric-car jump has slimmer payoffs. In some cases, it could even worsen the overall climate impact of driving, experts say.

The dilemma highlights the crucial importance of clean electricity in global goals to slash greenhouse-gas emissions, the focus of a December summit in Paris. Cutting emissions can help — but not if pollution is simply shifted from the tailpipes of cars to the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants, which generate 40 percent of the world’s electricity.

“The overall emissions of electricity generation in Europe still haven’t gone down,” said Luc Werring, the former principal adviser

JASPER JUINEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Booming trend causes surge in demand for energy, which often isn’t from clean sources to the European Commission on energy issues. “If you drive your car on mixed electricity, then you’re not reducing carbon as much as you’d expect.”

In Rotterdam, city leaders have been searching for ways to cut the smog that has long plagued the gridlocked center. Generous tax incentives have cut the cost of electric vehicles, and the high cost of gasoline — nearly $7 a gallon — has spurred people to buy the cars, making the country second only to Norway in terms of percentage of electric cars on the road. Four percent of all cars sold in the Netherlands last year were electric.In many ways, the Netherlands could be an ideal home for electric cars: The country is densely populated and smaller than West Virginia.

The best vehicles can now cross the nation on a single charge.

Rotterdam faces a challenge with the increase in electric cars, even as it encourages their use.

Household electricity demand will rise as the vehicles spread. The amount of electricity the vehicles need will increase by 50 percent by 2023, according to government projections, although it is still just

a fraction of the overall consumption of the country.

Electricity generated from renewable sources is increasing in the Netherlands, but with overall demand for electricity rising, the percentage of coal-generated electricity is staying stubbornly high.

Coal provided 29 percent of the country’s electricity last year, and it spiked even higher this year.

Coal is projected to provide about the same amount of electricity in 2030 as it did in 2014.

Amid a surge in U.S. coal exports, the dirtiest fuel is so cheap that it is upending European attempts to switch to cleaner sources of electricity.

“There was a discussion going on to shut down the coal generators, and that’s over. The coal price is too low,” said Marko Kruithof, the manager of sustainability and innovation at Stedin, the grid operator for Rotterdam.

In Rotterdam, Stedin has helped build thousands of charging stations. A Tesla charge-up costs about $20, and that gives it a 250-mile range. It’s much cheaper than driving a gasoline car.

In the United States, where a

Tesla, the Californiabased maker of highend electric cars, has made the Netherlands its European beachhead with a factory in Tilburg.

The share of electric vehicles has grown faster in the Netherlands than in nearly any other country, but much of the electricity used to charge the cars still comes from coal.

natural gas boom has helped push down emissions from the power sector, the potential climate benefits of electric cars vary widely depending on the cleanliness of the electricity mix.

In coal-fired Colorado, a gasoline car with fuel economy better than 35 miles per gallon will be better for emissions than the average electric car, according to calculations from the Union of Concerned Scientists. In hydropowered Upstate New York, in contrast, the same gas car would need to achieve 135 miles per gallon.

On average in major U.S. markets, electric cars would offer an improvement on carbon emissions, said Nic Lutsey, program director at the International Council on Clean Transportation.

“It seems that on the whole, the carbon footprint will only get better,” he said, because efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas production in electric power plants are moving forward more rapidly than electric-car production.

The biggest market in the world is China. Sales of electric cars tripled there between January and August compared with a year earlier, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Chinese leaders have embraced electric cars as a way of cleaning up cities that have some of the worst air quality in the world. But the Chinese electricity market is heavily dependent on coal; the pollution is simply being taken from the centers of cities and moved to their outskirts.

Amid the mixed picture for electric cars, some environmentalists say that money spent on them might be better used elsewhere.

“The economics do not make sense to push more electric vehicles onto the market” said John DeCicco of the University of Michigan Energy Institute. He said that attention might be better focused on making conventional combustion engines more efficient.

“There’s a movement toward cleaner energy, but it’s not there yet,” said Hugo de Bruijn, a sustainable mobility adviser in Rotterdam. “From an energy perspective, it’s not ideal.” n

changing forces I The Justice Department has implemented changes at numerous police departments with patterns of excessive or deadly force. But has it worked?

BY KIMBRIELL KELLY, SARAH CHILDRESS AND STEVEN RICH

n Detroit, the Justice Department forced reforms on police after officers fatally shot 47 people in five years, including six who were unarmed. The overhaul took 11 years and eight police chiefs. ¶ In Los Angeles, Justice intervened after police officers in an anti­gang unit were accused of beating and framing people. The reforms cost taxpayers an estimated $300 million. ¶ In New Orleans, Justice stepped in to overhaul the police department after officers over 17 months shot 27 people, all of whom were black. The changes have fueled departures from the ranks and deterred some officers from proactive policing. ¶ These are some of the unintended costs of federal intervention at agencies where the Justice Department found police had committed civil rights violations, according to a review by The Washington Post and the PBS series “Frontline.” ¶ Over the past two decades, the Justice Department has undertaken its deepest interventions at 16 police departments that had patterns of excessive or deadly force, implementing reforms under the watch of independent monitors. More than its predecessors, the Obama administration has aggressively pursued police departments over the abuses, recently launching probes after individuals died as a result of encounters with police in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo.

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COVER STORY The question is whether such interventions work. The Justice Department has not studied the long-term outcomes at the law enforcement agencies it has targeted.

To examine the impact, reporters surveyed the departments, visiting four cities. They interviewed officials, federal monitors and civil rights advocates. They also reviewed use-of-force data, monitoring reports and local budgets.

The reforms have led to modernized policies, new equipment and better training, police chiefs, city leaders, activists and Justice officials agree.

But measured by incidents of use of force, one of Justice’s primary metrics, the outcomes are mixed. In five of the 10 police departments for which sufficient data was provided, use of force by officers increased during and after the agreements. In five others, it stayed the same or declined.

None of the departments completed reforms by the targeted dates, the review found.

In most, the interventions have dragged years beyond original projections, driving up costs.

In 13 of the police departments for which budget data was available, costs are expected to surpass $600 million, expenses largely passed on to local taxpayers.

Officer morale in some of the departments plummeted during the interventions, according to interviews. Collectively, the departments have cycled through 52 police chiefs as the agencies tried to meet federal demands. Some departments have struggled to sustain reforms once oversight ended, and in some cities, police relations with residents remain strained.

In interviews, Justice Department officials defended the interventions and said that in recent years they have significantly improved the reform process. Those changes have led to greater oversight of police departments and to policing that better protects the civil rights of residents, they said.

“The goal isn’t that we have a perfect police department when we leave,” said Vanita Gupta, principal deputy assistant attorney general of the department’s civil rights division. “The goal is that they actually know what to do when there’s a problem.”

Power and pushback Congress empowered the federal government to police local law enforcement in 1994 in the aftermath of the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles officers after a high-speed car chase. Under the law, the Justice Department can investigate and force systemic changes on local police and sue if they do not comply.

Many of the federal investigations have started with complaints from civil rights groups or after a high-profile news event, such as the 2014 shooting in Ferguson of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer.

In Washington, Justice’s civil rights division receives about 200 complaints per week, many of them concerning some portion of the nation’s more than 15,000 police departments. Its attorneys focus on the ones in which they see

PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

abuse patterns, including racial profiling, unlawful arrests and illegal searches. Most investigations include allegations of excessive force.

“The police departments that we go into, small or big, are ones where there have been findings of pretty significant systemic patternor-practice constitutional violations,” Gupta said. “Whether they’re the worst, I don’t know.

Whether they are in crisis, yes.”

Jonathan Smith, who headed the division’s special litigation section for five years until April, said some departments have been targeted because their problems illustrate larger nationwide issues.

“A good example is that we took on a bunch of cases where one of the critical elements was how police use force against persons who are in mental health crisis,” Smith said, citing Albuquerque’s 2014 reform agreement.

In the past two decades, the Justice Department has launched 67 civil rights investigations of police departments. Nine remain unresolved.

Of the completed investigations, 24 were closed without reform agreements, meaning investigators did not have sufficient evidence to prove civil rights abuses or the agencies informally resolved the problems, officials said.

In eight investigations, Justice documented patterns of civil rights abuses and won promis-

Opposite page, a New Orleans police officer on horseback and state troopers respond to an incident on Bourbon Street in September.

In the wake of reforms, the size of the city police force has dwindled. At top, Xiomara Rivera Cruz, 27, says she was slapped by an officer as she was recording him trying to make an arrest in Caguas, Puerto Rico. Above, Arnaldo Claudio, the federal monitor of Puerto Rico’s 2013 reform agreement, routinely flies between his homes there and in Virginia to keep tabs on the progress. The agreement costs about $1.5 million annually to monitor.

KLMNO WEEKLY

es from the departments to reform. Those cases were settled out of court with no independent or federal oversight.

Twenty-six investigations — a little more than half of them since President Obama took office — have led to the most rigorous outcome: binding agreements tracked by monitors. More than half were consent decrees, meaning they were approved and managed in federal court.

Of the 26, Justice found patterns of excessive force in 16 of its investigations. The other 10 were investigations that found abuses including uninvestigated sexual assaults and racial profiling. Oversight continues until the monitor concludes that local police have completed or complied with most reforms.

The Justice Department’s only broad assessment of its interventions occurred as part of a 2010 roundtable with police chiefs from some of the departments targeted. One of the conclusions: Federal officials had no universal way to measure impact and needed better data to determine whether reforms worked.

But numbers will not tell the full story, experts said.

“The hard question — have you stopped doing the things that got you into court in the first place — is something that these consent decrees seem to have trouble answering,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law at Columbia University who has studied reform agreements.

Justice officials said the newest generation of reform agreements, starting with Seattle in 2012 and 11 police departments since, includes benchmarks to indicate whether the reforms are taking hold. Gupta, the civil rights division chief, said Justice can then adjust as needed.

She also said Justice officials are working more closely with local law enforcement and community members to build trust.

She cited federal reforms of police in East Haven, Conn., Seattle and Los Angeles as successes that have produced “transformation.”

“And transformation is more than just . . . enactment of specific reforms,” Gupta said. “It really is a fundamental change in how the community relates to the police department and vice versa.”

But she said once the monitoring ends, so does Justice’s involvement.

“We don’t tend to evaluate . . . after we have left,” Gupta said. “There’s a limit to how much we can . . . remain engaged with a particular jurisdiction given our limited resources.”

Some critics have complained that federal interventions leave abusive officers in uniform because the agreements target policies and practices of an agency, not individual employees. But experts said reforming departments is more important than trying to punish officers.

Most of the agencies targeted have agreed to the federal demands, although this year the Justice Department lost its first case, against the 117-officer sheriff’s office in Alamance County, N.C. Justice sued Sheriff Terry S. Johnson in 2012 for his agency’s alleged targeting of Latinos during traffic stops.

U.S. District Judge Thomas D. Schroeder continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

dismissed the case in August after finding that Justice did not present “reliable and persuasive proof” of a pattern or practice of civil rights abuses. The department, which declined to comment on the case, has appealed his ruling. Johnson also declined to comment for this article.

“Unfortunately, most law enforcement agencies are afraid to challenge the civil rights division, even when its claims are completely bogus,” said Alamance County Attorney Clyde B. Albright.

Training and trends In suburban Maryland, the Justice Department launched back-to-back civil rights investigations of the Prince George’s County police department after dogs in its K-9 unit inflicted 800 bites over seven years and police officers fatally shot 47 people over a decade.

The investigations in 1999 and 2000 led to separate reform agreements that were completed by 2009. The reforms that the Justice Department required included provisions that supervisors approve the use of police dogs and that a board be established to review shootings.

“It was a painful time. There’s no question about it going through that,” said Prince George’s Police Chief Mark Magaw, a department veteran who took over the top job in 2010.

“But both of those agreements have made us better, hands down.”

One of the biggest changes, Magaw said, is in the department’s relationship with the community. He said he meets monthly with NAACP officials, Muslim business owners and the police union.

Bob Ross, president of the Prince George’s County NAACP branch, said the department is more in touch with county residents. The number of complaints to the local NAACP about excessive police force has gone from 10 to 15 calls a month to one or two, he said. Ross said that the department is receptive when issues arise but that improvements are still needed.

Ross said he recently received a complaint from two black men who were stopped in their car by police because one was reclined in the passenger seat. “I will be sitting with the chief, and we’ll talk about that,” he said.

Since the reforms, the average annual number of bites by police dogs is below pre-intervention levels.

In 2010, the department reported 303 useof-force incidents. That number has increased through 2014, when police reported 555. Over the same period, complaints about officers’ use of force have declined from 123 to 80.

Magaw attributed the increase in reported incidents to the department broadening its definition of use of force and to the county’s growing population. “The way I read these numbers is we’re doing a better job, we’re holding our officers more accountable and we’re being more transparent,” he said.

In the District, police agreed in 2001 to a long list of reforms sought by the Justice

Federal interventions at police departments Since the Justice Department began investigating civil rights violations by police in 1994, it has forced 25 police departments* to reform under the watch of independent monitors. Of the departments targeted, 16 were found to have patterns that included excessive use of force by officers. Nine had patterns of other civil rights violations.

PATTERNS OF EXCESSIVE FORCE DEPARTMENT

LOCATION

Albuquerque PD

N.M.

2014

Cincinnati PD

Ohio

2002

Cleveland Division of Police

Ohio

2015

Detroit PD

Mich.

2003

District of Columbia Metropolitan PD

D.C.

2001

Los Angeles PD

Calif.

2001

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept.–Antelope Valley

Calif.

2015

New Orleans PD

La.

2013

Pittsburgh PD

Pa.

1997

Portland Police Bureau

Ore.

2012

Prince George’s County PD

Md.

2004

Puerto Rico PD

Puerto Rico

2013

Seattle PD

Wash.

2012

Steubenville PD

Ohio

1997

Virgin Islands PD

Virgin Islands

2009

Warren PD

Ohio

2012

Department. The federal intervention was prompted by a Post investigation that found D.C. officers had fatally shot more people per capita in the 1990s than officers at any other large city police department nationwide.

“The city was bankrupt. And the police department was in shambles,” said Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier, who assumed leadership of the department in 2007 during the seventh year of the reforms.

Lanier said the reforms have led to better training, improved policies and the use of less-lethal options in confrontations, including pepper spray and rubber bullets. Since the agreement ended in 2012, police have reported a steady decrease in the use of force and civilian complaints, the review found. The number of fatal shootings by police has decreased slightly.

“When the only thing you have to respond to an attack is your gun, that’s what officers were using,” Lanier said.

Because of the improving situation, Lanier said that she downsized the use-of-force investigation team created by the reforms, consolidating it with internal affairs. “At the time when we implemented it, we needed the 30 or 40 people to do it,” she said.

Michael G. Tobin, executive director of the D.C. Office of Police Complaints, said the inde-

AGREEMENT ENTERED

pendent civilian oversight group has seen a “slight” uptick in citizen complaints in the past year and a 40 percent increase in questions about police conduct, which he thinks is the result of media coverage. But he said he believes the department has improved.

In Albuquerque, the Justice Department opened an investigation in 2012 after police fatally shot 20 people in three years. Some of those killed suffered from mental illness. The city’s 2014 agreement with Justice requires that officers be trained to de-escalate conflicts and generally prohibits some tactics, such as restraining a person by the neck. Since the federal investigation began, the number of times officers used force dropped by 57 percent, from 287 to 122, records show.

Chief Gorden Eden Jr. attributed the drop to the fact that most officers are now trained in crisis intervention.

“Our officers are taking more time at the calls; they’re taking more time to assess the situation,” said Eden, who was named chief in 2014.

Costs soar The costs of implementing the reform agreements are primarily shouldered by local taxpayers. In many cities, those costs have grown as projected deadlines came and went. Resistance from police officials, city leadership or rankand-file officers have contributed to delays.

In Los Angeles, the reform agreement was set to take five years. Police provided budget records showing about $115 million in spending. But Sharon Tso, the city’s chief legislative analyst, estimated actual costs were about $300 million. The agreement took nearly 12 years, making it the longest and costliest reform by the Justice Department to date.

The Justice Department insisted on reforms in 2000 after the scandal in the department’s Rampart division over its anti-gang unit. Officers were accused of shooting and beating suspects and framing people.

As part of its reforms, the police department spent an estimated $40 million on computer systems to track traffic and pedestrian stops and officer performance, Tso said. Police also created an 80-member division to investigate serious uses of force, said Arif Alikhan, who was hired by the police department to help continue the reforms.

“It’s a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of effort. But it’s also about important things, things the department is very proud of,” Alikhan said.

In Detroit, the agreement was also projected to take five years, but it dragged on for 11 years, making it the second-longest such undertaking by the Justice Department.

Justice began investigating the Detroit police in 2001 after a string of fatal shootings by officers. In 2003, the city agreed to federal reforms, and a federal judge concluded in 2014 that the city had reached compliance.

City officials said they don’t know how much has been spent implementing the reforms, which originally were projected to cost

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COVER STORY $50 million, or about $10 million annually, according to news reports. Detroit, which has long struggled financially, emerged last year from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Chester L. Logan, who was Detroit’s police chief for two years during the reforms, said implementation dragged on because of pushback from the rank and file.

“Frankly, it took us probably four or five years for us to say, ‘Our backs are against the wall, we’ve got to get this done,’ ” said Logan, who retired in July after nearly 40 years with the department.

In many cases, the salaries and expenses of the federal monitors and their staffs, who fly in and out of the cities, are among the largest costs.

Critics have complained that the monitors have a financial incentive to prolong the oversight.

Under a cloud One of Justice’s earliest civil rights investigations of police was New Orleans in 1996. The probe ended in 2004 without an agreement after the city pledged to reform on its own. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, four officers faced criminal charges for shooting at people trying to cross the Danziger Bridge. Four years later, a string of police shootings of black people prompted investigators to return in 2010.

“The NOPD has long been a troubled agency,” the Justice Department concluded in 2011. “. . . In the absence of mechanisms to protect and promote civil rights, officers too frequently use excessive force and conduct illegal stops, searches and arrests with impunity.”

The city appealed a judge’s approval of the reform settlement but lost. The federal agreement, finalized in 2013, includes a requirement of in-car cameras. Separately, the city in 2014 began requiring police to use body cameras, ordering officers to activate them when they step out of their vehicles. Those who don’t have their pay docked. The judge overseeing the federal intervention incorporated the body cameras into the broader reforms, requiring monthly compliance reports.

The reforms — specifically the requirement to use body cameras — have made officers reluctant to do elective, proactive policing, said Capt. Mike Glasser, who heads the Police Association of New Orleans. “Yes, he looks suspicious. Yes, he might be up to no good. But you know what? I don’t have to do that,” Glasser said. “Because you don’t get in trouble for what you don’t do.”

New Orleans Police Superintendent Michael Harrison, a department veteran who took over last year, agreed that the body cameras have made officers wary. “Officers are somewhat reserved about their levels of aggression toward fighting violent crime because of the oversight.”

In the wake of the reforms, the size of the police force has dwindled through attrition and a hiring freeze, from 1,500 to 1,150. Recruits are dropping out of the city police academy to work for the state police, where they don’t have to worry about body cameras and can earn more money, Glasser said.

ME

AGREEMENTS BY STATE

VT

WA 1

ID

MT 2

ND

MN

IL

MI 1

OR 1

NV

WY

SD

IA

IN

OH 4

UT

CO

NE

MO

KY

WV

VA

AZ 1

NM 1

KS

AR

TN

NC

SC

OK

LA 1

MS 1

AL

GA 1

CA 2

HI

WI

AK

NY 1 PA 1

TX

NJ 1 MD 3

NH

MA CT 1

RI

DE

DC 1

FL

PR 1

VI 1

OTHER CIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATIONS DEPARTMENT

LOCATION

AGREEMENT ENTERED

Buffalo PD

N.Y.

2002

East Haven PD

Conn.

2012

Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office

Ariz.

2015

Meridian PD

Miss.

2015

Missoula PD

Mont.

2013

Montgomery County PD

Md.

2000

New Jersey State PD

N.J.

1999

Prince George’s County PD

Md.

2004

University of Montana Office of Public Safety

Mont.

2013

Villa Rica PD

Ga.

2013

*Prince George’s County police were investigated twice in separate cases that ended in monitored agreements. Source: Justice Department

THE WASHINGTON POST

“There’s a stigma that we carry being under a consent decree,” Harrison said.

The department dropped its college requirement for applicants over the monitor’s objections. Police also have launched an aggressive recruiting campaign that includes ads on Domino’s Pizza boxes.

In Seattle, Justice began an investigation in 2011 after 35 community groups complained about a pattern of excessive force by police. The next year, the police department agreed to reforms. Amid the investigation, officers became less proactive, according to interviews and data gathered by the department.

The number of times officers took the initiative to engage with someone — as opposed to being dispatched to a call — dropped nearly 20 percent from 2010 to 2012. These engagements climbed by nearly 11 percent in 2013 before plummeting again in 2014 to the lowest point in five years.

“Cops are human beings,” said Ron Smith, president of Seattle’s union for rank-and-file officers. “They said, ‘Well, when we did those things, that’s what got us in trouble. So we won’t do those things anymore.’ ” Smith said that Chief Kathleen O’Toole, who was hired last year, has helped restore morale by taking steps that included streamlining reviews for officers involved in shootings. This year’s data shows officers taking the initiative more often. “I think we’ve recovered from the initial shock,” Smith said.

FATAL POLICE SHOOTINGS IN 2015

853 people have been fatally shot by police

52 of those involved 16 police departments found by the Justice Department to have had patterns of excessive or deadly force

KLMNO WEEKLY

Sustaining change Once the reform agreements end and the monitors depart, local police aren’t required to adhere to the changes. “Communities are on their own,” said Samuel Walker, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a policing expert.

In 1997, Pittsburgh was the first city to agree to Justice Department reforms, after the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit based on complaints from 66 people that ranged from physical abuse to police rudeness.

By 2002, the department had made a number of changes, including updated use-of-force policies and improved training. The consent decree was left in place for three more years to continue reforming the complaint-investigation process.

In 2005, Pittsburgh police used force 1,900 times. In 2013, that number had increased by nearly 44 percent, to 2,727. Complaints about excessive force have declined: from 126 in 2006 to 48 in 2014. That decline, experts said, could indicate that residents are losing faith that their complaints will be addressed.

Turnover in the chief’s office and major violent incidents have made for uneven progress, civil rights groups said. “What we’ve seen is a good amount of backsliding,” said Witold “Vic” Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania ACLU who helped prepare the suit alleging civil rights abuses that brought in the Justice Department.

In 2010, Jordan Miles, an 18-year-old black man, was seriously injured in a struggle after officers tried to arrest him as he was walking to his grandmother’s house. A jury cleared the officers of using excessive force but determined that police had unlawfully arrested Miles and awarded him $119,000 in damages.

In 2012, an officer shot Leon Ford, an unarmed black man, during a traffic stop, paralyzing him from the waist down. The officer said he thought Ford was reaching for a weapon. The officer was placed on desk duty, and Ford has sued the city.

Pittsburgh’s latest police chief, Cameron McLay, has been on the job for a year and said he is working with community groups to increase public trust and strengthen accountability for officers. The backward slide came because of “a breakdown in the systems of accountability,” McLay said in an interview.

McLay has established a professional standards office inside the department to investigate whether officers follow policy during incidents. He has also ordered audits to ensure that officers turn on body microphones and dashboard cameras during calls. And, he said, he is reinvesting in data analysis and training.

“You can gain compliance with policies and get people to stop engaging in dysfunctional behavior,” McLay said, “but unless you change the way people feel about their job and start holding themselves responsible . . . the accountability will last only as long as I do.” n Childress is a senior digital reporter for the Enterprise Journalism Group at “Frontline.”

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LIFESTYLES: COMMENTARY

This was all my trash from an entire year.

Here’s how I did it.

BY

D ARSHAN K ARWAT

I

n the spring of 2010, on an episode of the radio show “The Story,” I heard the tale of a British couple who lived trash-free. I walked home from my laboratory at the University of Michigan and told my roommate Tim that I thought I could do better — I’d live trash- and recycling-free — and that I’d start soon.

“No,” he said. “If you care about this, then you start today.” And just like that, I began an experiment in individual activism in the face of large environmental problems.

The average American produces more than four pounds of trash and recyclables per day, about 1,500 pounds per year. In my first year of living trash- and recyclingfree, I produced a little more than 71/2 pounds of waste, including receipts and miscellaneous paper, a couple of Ruffles chips bags and a few straws, stickers off of fruit, glass milk-bottle caps, a broken Pyrex dish, a broken milk bottle, one beer bottle and one plastic bottle. In year two, I made it down to six pounds — about 0.4 percent of the American average.

To get there, I knew I needed to change the way I lived, and I needed some parameters. Everything apart from food scraps (which I’d compost), toothpaste and soap (which were too difficult to recover), and toilet paper counted as trash or recycling. I collected my refuse — concert tickets, stickers, plastic tags, packaging, glass, you name it — and didn’t throw it away.

I made a few exceptions. I couldn’t always control other people’s behavior, so junk mail wouldn’t count as my own recycling. I wasn’t going to be a boor and tell a dinner-party host how to reduce trash. And if someone gave

me a gift — a token from the heart — I accepted it. Also, I was working on my aerospace engineering PhD in an experimental combustion lab, and my research required many single-use materials: Mylar, latex gloves, ultra-high-molecularweight polyethylene (milk carton material), optical cleaning wipes and so on. If I wanted to conduct quality research and finish my dissertation, I’d have to separate requirements inside the lab from my habits outside it.

I knew this experiment wouldn’t make a profound difference for conservation, but I felt I should do it because I had no excuse not to. Others don’t have the flexibility or the means for this kind of activism. Or they may simply have more immediate concerns. Consumption is so convenient that it is truly invisible and routine. I tried my best not be sanctimonious to people less committed than I. I had to get creative. When a restaurant furnished a napkinwrapped fork and knife, I asked the server to exchange them for cutlery without the napkin. I’d remember to say “No straw!” after asking for water and to make sure the veggie burger I ordered didn’t come with a wooden pick holding it together. I tried to think ahead. I carried a fork, a spoon, a plate and a bowl everywhere I went, just in case a student event served food but provided only plastic to eat with. I did what I had to, and sometimes it was awkward. At a house party (where the red Solo cup is king), I’d saunter into the kitchen, use a glass from the cupboard, and then rinse it and put it back when I was done. Five months into the experiment, after some initial reservations, I gave up toilet paper. Now I do things the way hundreds of millions (including my extended family) in India do

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

— with water and my left hand.

In many ways, though, my life didn’t change much. I had grown up in a humble setting in India, where I was accustomed to consuming as little as possible. I was a member of the People’s Food Coop in Ann Arbor, where I bought my produce unpackaged. Most of my waste came from food packaging, so anything I could do to limit it reduced my trash and recycling significantly. I bought bread from the bakery, gave up most cheeses and drank milk only when it came in reusable bottles. Even though I seldom bought new gizmos or clothes, I stopped buying them entirely for this project, because I knew creating them, transporting them and selling them at retailers generated plenty of upstream waste. If I thought I really needed something, like a new mug or hoodie, I’d wait a week before buying it. And then I’d wait another week. Turns out I never bought those things, which means I never needed them. I had enough already. Compared with the way so many others live, it wasn’t much of

I knew this experiment wouldn’t make a profound difference for conservation but I felt I should do it because I had no excuse not to.

a hardship.

But sometimes even the best intentions couldn’t eliminate waste. Once, as I was opening a can of mango pulp that predated the experiment, the lid popped off and landed behind the fridge.

When I reached blindly for it, I cut a smooth, deep gash in my finger and used Band-Aids to stanch the blood. Even more painful was the moment during Christmas break in 2010 when my parents, who live in Pennsylvania, decided to change the cellphone plan they shared with me. A new plan meant a new phone. After two hours spent trying to persuade Verizon to let me keep my old flip phone or trade it for a used one, I gave up. I got a new phone that winter, the flip phone I now use. But the old one would probably still function fine.

Then there were the times I gladly indulged. During the summer of 2010, a chain-smoking Romanian man sponsored some experiments in our lab. He’d come around to help run them every now and then. A great World Cup

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

17

LIFESTYLES All of Darshan Karwat’s 71/2 pounds of trash from an entire year fit into these two shopping bags.

match was about to start one day, and, learning that all of us in the lab were going to watch it, he asked us where he could find a vending machine. A few minutes later, he came back with 12 bags of potato chips, a couple for each of us. “Screw the experiments this afternoon,” he told us. “Let’s eat some junk and watch some football.” I enjoyed those chips.

The hardest part was figuring out the best way to talk about what I was doing. It is important to speak to people in a language they understand — a language that respects where they come from, their motivations,theirupbringings.Thiswas crucial because I was constantly asked to explain myself at restaurants, in social gatherings, with friends and colleagues and strangers. Also, big issues such as trash and recycling are intimately tied to other big issues such as economic growth, globalization and climate change. So, as I wrote about the experiment on my blog, what began as a discussion of trash and consumption quickly became a discussion of governance, economy, peace

In comparison, the average American produces nearly 1,500 pounds of trash a year, enough to fill 400 shopping bags.

andpillageoftheEarth,poverty,the limits of human knowledge, complexity and simplicity. It was much harder to explain all that than it would be simply to announce myself as a vegetarian, for instance.

Sometimes I failed, and a few skeptics wrote me off as a treehugger. But I think such remarks are an easy way to deflect tough questions about how to live more gently on Earth. To reduce our environmental footprint, we need to know how to make full use of the investments we have already made in material objects. We need to know how to take the most advantage of our ever-increasing body of scientific, technological and social knowledge to create an economy based on reduced consumption. We need to talk more about how collective change is possible by experimentation in our individual lives.

More often, though, people gave me their support. The experiment inspired others to undertake similar experiments on their own for a week or a month. A couple of friends — one in China and her

brother in Ann Arbor — are now doing it for a year. Admittedly, my effort found both a receptive audience and a useful infrastructure in Ann Arbor, one of America’s most environmentally conscious cities. I could get pretty much all of my food unpackaged, and there were several great secondhand stores if I really needed something — shops where the shoes didn’t come in boxes and the tools weren’t wrapped in protective plastic casing. I recognize that not everybody has the level of control over their lives that I do, enjoys the privileges I do or lives in the kinds of places I have. I know that I am a bit of an outlier.

But anyone can reduce their consumption. What are the social and economic infrastructures available that you aren’t using?

What waste is so ingrained in your routine that it is invisible? In focusing on my choices through trash, I was able to highlight things beyond my immediate control. While the experiment was in small part about saying no to something because of the packaging or materials, it was more

KLMNO WEEKLY

broadly about saying no to what was inside that packaging — and all the environmental damage, sweatshop labor and other harmful practices that go into things.

Humans have caused daunting problems: The polar ice caps are melting, a manmade mass extinction is underway, the oceans are full of trash, surface mines are tearing up the countryside and indigenous people’s cultures are eroding thanks to global commerce. My project did not reshape those trends. Its effect on the trash and recycling produced in the United States was insignificant.

But those conversations I had about materialism, consumerism and social change had an impact, albeit a hard-to-measure one. It also ameliorated my sense of complicity; it allowed me to attempt to answer the question of how we — as privileged individuals — stand up in the face of large problems to create examples and communities of change.

I didn’t even have to become a recluse. Rather, my quality of life improved. I learned to be more present in my choices, and I learned what is important to me, regardless of what others think.

We don’t have to go back in time to heed environmental boundaries.

We just have to be creative. What began as a one-year experiment ultimately lasted 21/2 years, the rest of my time in Ann Arbor. I still have with me the few bags that hold all 30 months’ worth of trash and recycling.

Standing in my kitchen in Washington, I think about the waste I generate now, in a city that doesn’t have the same infrastructure that Ann Arbor has. While many great facilities exist in this city, it is much larger and less dense, and so rounding up all the ingredients for a trash- and recycling-free life requires longer trips by foot or bike. I’ve fallen short of my Michigan strictures: It has been more than six weeks since I moved here, but my 11/2-gallon trash and recycling bins are both full already. It’s time for me to go to the chute to send these materials to a landfill and a reprocessing facility. It’s not like I’m a profligate consumer today, but I can’t say it doesn’t hurt. n Karwat is an AAAS science and technology policy fellow at the Energy Department and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

As much a character as a condition N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL D IRDA

D LONDON FOG The Biography

By Christine L. Corton Belknap/Harvard Univ.

391 pp. $35

uring the Victorian era, the worst London fogs occurred in the 1880s and ’90s, most often in November. Yet as early as 1853, in the opening pages of “Bleak House,” Charles Dickens refers to “implacable November weather” and goes on to describe “smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot as big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” There is, he says, “fog everywhere” — and not the soft, dove-gray cloudiness we might imagine. This was 19th-century air pollution: thick, malodorous, yellow or black — and almost smothering.

As Christine L. Corton reminds us in “London Fog: The Biography,” England’s capital “has always been susceptible to mist and murk.” As early as the 17th century, the diarist and gardener John Evelyn was complaining about the increasing “smoke” problem, blaming lime kilns for poisoning the atmosphere. By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, dense fogs could make travel, whether by foot or horse-drawn carriage, almost impossible — and the adverse conditions could persist for days. An 1892 study concluded that between 1886 and 1890 there were, on average, 63 foggy days per year.

During these periods of stygian gloom, “linklighters” — street urchins carrying homemade torches — would guide gentlemen and their ladies through the darkness for a charge. Sometimes, the wellto-do would be led helplessly into alleys and robbed.

London’s fogs mostly resulted from the gritty smoke of domestic coal fires and “the noxious emissions of factory chimneys,” coupled with the right atmospheric wet and stillness. Sulfurous elements gave the miasma a yellowish tinge like that of pea soup (then usually made from dried yellow split peas, not green ones).

TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS

Workers walk along the River Thames on a misty morning in London on Nov. 2.

A bad fog was a “pea-souper” or, later, a “London particular” (originally a term denoting a kind of brown Madeira wine). Besides yellow and brown, fogs were described by Victorians as “gray yellow, of a deep orange, and even black.”

By the 20th century, periodic attempts were underway to eliminate the emissions that gave rise to fog, but — then as now — industrialists resisted any technological changes that might cost them, no matter what the harm to people or the environment. Only in 1956 were sufficient laws passed to forestall further visits from “King Fog.” These days, “London particulars” are simply mists of water vapor.

Along with historical accounts of the city’s fogs, Corton’s “biography” looks closely at their representation in art and literature. Her book is packed with newspaper illustrations, reproductions of hazy, impressionistic paintings by

Whistler and Monet, many photographs, and even stills from films about Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes. Above all, though, she tracks the metaphorical use of fog in English literature, beginning with a superb chapter on “Dickensian gloom,” in which she discusses “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “Bleak House,” “Martin Chuzzlewit” and “Our Mutual Friend.”

For many writers, she notes, fog “became a symbol for the threat to the clear outlines of a hierarchical social order as it dissolved moral boundaries and replaced reassuring certainties with obscurity and doubt.” In novel after novel, fogs led to “social peril, immorality, crime, and disorder”: In the blackness, proprieties fell away, while thieves and murderers could strike with impunity and simply vanish.

Writers of early science fiction also used fogs as a method of mass destruction. Published in 1880, William Delisle Hay’s “The Doom

of the Great City: Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942” depicts London’s population choking to death beneath a smog caused by rampant urban industrialism. In “The Poison Cloud” (1908), by Hugh Owen, London’s population is snuffed out by a kind of proto-mustard gas caused by foreign coal (doubtless from Germany).

Today we think of London fog mainly as the atmospheric backdrop to late-Victorian ghost stories and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes: “It was a September evening and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city.” So writes Dr. Watson, as we settle back to enjoy “The Sign of the Four” (1890) and learn the mystery of the great Agra treasure. What could be better reading for a late fall evening?

But without the fog, the novel wouldn’t be half as much fun. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A bracing take on motherhood, guilt

He forever altered the mystery genre

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

n the twilight of a year rich with books about race in America, Mary Gaitskill has just published a novel about the knee-smashing effects of minority poverty and the corrosive tonic of liberal guilt. “The Mare” is not a colossal epic of our era; its vision is precise; its protagonists — all female — are socially invisible. But here, without a drop of condescension, is fiction that pumps blood through the cold facts of inequality in our country.

The whole story germinates in soil fertilized by good intentions.

For Velvet, an 11-year-old Dominican girl in Brooklyn, the Fresh Air Fund promises a chance to get away from the city, to swim, to ride a horse. A pamphlet promoting this bucolic summer adventure shows “a picture of a woman with big white legs sitting in a chair with a hat on and a plastic orange flower in her hand, looking like she was waiting for somebody to have fun with.”

Velvet catches the saccharine scent hovering over this program, but in fact there is a white woman waitingforherinpastoralparadise: Her name is Ginger. She’s a reformed alcoholic, happily married, but very unhappily childless. A friend suggests that Ginger and her husband take a baby step toward adoption by hosting a Fresh Air kid from the inner city. She sees the same pamphlet that Velvet sees: “It was sentimental and flattering to white vanity and manipulative as hell,” Ginger says. “It was also irresistible.” And so begins a relationship founded on impossibly divergent expectations.

This is a book determined to give us nowhere to hide in crevices of self-satisfied superiority or innocence, and much of that intensity stems from the novel’s structure. With few exceptions, the entire story is a relentless volley of short soliloquies between this quiet brown girl and this needy white woman in upstate New York.

There’s something almost too naked, too unmediated about their

confessions, but this unvarnished candor is nonetheless magnetic, keeping us wrapped up in their wounded minds for several years.

In this stirring series of monologues, Gaitskill has created a tragedy without villains. Ginger is well-meaning, but her desperation to be the perfect surrogate mom sweats off these pages. Once Velvet moves in, Ginger vibrates with happiness so intense, so fragile, that it seems ready to shatter.

There’s a significant risk — just barely avoided here — of making Ginger sound like a latter-day hysteric, “a childless neurotic fool.”

But Gaitskill roots these anxieties in the piercing expectations of contemporary women. By caring for this girl, Ginger hopes that she can finally quell the sense that she’s incompetent, that she’s essentially unfeminine compared to those pretty, fertile women in town.

Remarkably, Gaitskill’s treatment of Velvet is just as astute and sympathetic. Without a touch of artifice, she captures the raw poetry in the girl’s speech and her astonished insights into the world. “Why is it,” she wonders, “that white people can walk their path in a way that black people — and people of my color — cannot?”

Velvet must somehow negotiate the cruelties of school, the urges of her own heart and the clammy generosity of this white woman who has pledged her devotion so immoderately. Her beaten but irrepressible spirit is never less than wholly captivating.

Velvet immediately falls in love with the horses boarded near Ginger’s house, particularly a troubled mare named Fugly Girl, who responds to Velvet with preternatural attention. The story’s finish line would seem to be hopelessly obvious — you can almost see the blue ribbon flapping in the wind — but Gaitskill’s fidelity to the voice of this 11-year-old girl and the dispiriting challenges that lie in her path ensures that nothing here is preordained. n

W

THE MARE

By Mary Gaitskill Pantheon. 441 pp. $26.95

WILKIE COLLINS

By Peter Ackroyd Doubleday. 252 pp. $25

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

ilkie Collins liberated the mystery story from drafty castles and clanking chains. He realized that creepier forms of terror can be found in the suburban house next door, that villains need not be one-dimensional incarnations of malignity, that harm is likelier to come from a con man than a ghoul. Along with Edgar Allan Poe, Collins created the thriller, but the Englishman may be the more influential of the two.

It was his prowess as a storyteller that flung down the challenge for all subsequent mystery writers: Give readers a plot so engrossing that it snatches them right out of their mundane lives.

Peter Ackroyd’s smart, stylish book on Collins is the latest volume in a series called Ackroyd’s Brief Lives. (He has also done Chaucer, J.M.W. Turner, Newton and Poe.) More than other biographers, Ackroyd brings out the contrast between Collins’s serenity — “He was perhaps the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists” — and the poor health that dogged him for much of his life.

The Collinses were comfortable, if not rich. Young Wilkie traveled to continental Europe as a child and returned as a roistering young adult. Back in London, he toiled in the office of a tea-importing firm. In 1848, he published a two-volume biography of his father, who had recentlydied. Farmoretohis liking, though, was inventing stories. After trying his hand at a historical novel set in fifth-century A.D. Rome, he gravitated to the kind of melodrama with which his name has been associated ever since: “Basil, a Story of Modern Life,” in which the title character trails a woman he first saw on an omnibus to a half-built square in north London. As Ackroyd describes it, “This is the prelude to a narrative of revenge and suffering on a sensational scale.”

Sales were encouraging enough that Collins wrote another novel, and more after that. He was good at his craft and getting better, but

he was also lucky. As Ackroyd notes, “He lived through a period in which the audience for fiction was rapidly widening, and when novels themselves were increasing in importance.”

Collins published “The Woman in White” in 1860, a propitious start to the decade in which he did his best work. The novel was sensational not only in content (the eponymous woman is first seen running through a London neighborhood at night, in obvious fear of being caught by pursuers) but also in its effect on the public. “The Woman in White” first came out in serial installments, and avid readers would line up in front of the periodical’s office to wait for each new issue.

Soon Collins was fast friends with Charles Dickens, as well as the beneficiary of a highly unusual domestic arrangement. He kept two mistresses, each in a separate household, and never married either of them — or anyone else.

Collins’s scintillating 1860s continued with “No Name” (1862), a novel of revenge that shows him plotting at his brilliant best. Next came “Armadale” (1866), very good but with a storyline so complex that Ackroyd wisely declines to summarize it. The last of the big four, “The Moonstone” (1868), may be Collins’s masterpiece. T.S. Eliot’s verdict on it — “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels” — arguably holds good to this day.

Nothing Collins wrote in the remaining two decades of his life comes close to the 1860s quartet.

The pain afflicting him — from gout, rheumatism, nervous tension, eye trouble and more — surely weakened his Muse, as did the laudanum (tincture of opium) he took to feel better.

Who knows what a healthy Collins might have achieved? Yet four mesmerizing novels — built on a grand scale and chock full of suspense — is an admirable record.

Novels to lose yourself in are one of life’s greatest pleasures. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

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OPINIONS

Our security and privacy are really pretty balanced ALAN CHARLES RAUL a partner at the law firm Sidley Austin, was vice chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2006 to 2008.

After 9/11, U.S. political leaders of all stripes demanded better intelligence and a greater ability to “connect the dots.”

Such a terrorist attack had to be prevented from happening again. Well, it has happened again, of course, repeatedly, in Paris, as well as in London, Madrid and, indeed, in Boston and nearly in Times Square. But until the recent brutality of the Islamic State, the pendulum of our response, naturally enough, had swung back toward privacy and away from national security. We must now rethink how far we want — and need — our government to go to keep us safe from people who unequivocally want to kill as many of us as cruelly as they can.

In hindsight, our country’s handling of the putative trade-off between national security and privacy after Sept. 11 has actually been reasonably reassuring. The lesson for us now is that by overlaying aggressive privacy safeguards and rigorous oversight onto the intelligence community’s aggressive electronic surveillance, we can protect our values without compromising national security.

First, it is important to acknowledge that after 9/11, then-President George W. Bush and Congress cooperated, for the most part, to provide intelligence agencies and law enforcement with new tools to find and fight the terrorists, the bulk of which were necessary updates and not controversial. The Patriot Act was enacted on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.

The dot-disconnecting walls separating the FBI from the National Security Agency and CIA were taken down, and joint counterterrorism centers were established. A dedicated Homeland Security Department was raised. While the implementation of all this was hardly perfect, it was pretty good given the scale of the

undertaking. And, so far, it has largely worked to keep us safe.

Second, it is necessary to concede that Bush’s decision to ground his terrorist surveillance program on the inherent constitutional powers of the presidency and Congress’s authorization of military force against terrorists created contention, controversy and suspicion. Pushing the authority of the presidency too far risked counterproductively eroding confidence in the government’s intentions.

Third, and most important, however, is the apparent absence of any political abuse of electronic surveillance. While that statement may at first blush seem bizarre or highly controversial, think about it: There have not been allegations of the type of constitutional outrages that plagued intelligence agencies in decades past. Nothing like SHAMROCK, under which the NSA collected truly massive amounts of telecommunications data without legal authorization, or COINTELPRO, under which J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI infiltrated domestic political organizations outside legal boundaries, or the lawless, unjustified intrusions into the Rev. Martin Luther King

LARRY DOWNING/REUTERS

A protest against U.S. surveillance policy in Washington in January 2014.

Jr.’s life and associations. While there have been allegations of surveillance excess, such as the New York Police Department’s alleged scrutiny of mosques based on religious profiling, we have not seen any systematic deployment of electronic surveillance for intimidation or repressive purposes.

To be sure, courts and Congress have questioned whether the bulk telephone metadata program, as originally conceived and ultimately carried out under the Patriot Act, was consistent with the legal requirement that the telephone records pertain to a specific counterterrorism investigation.

But it was not absurd or wildly intrusive to justify collecting the whole haystack of phone records in order to be sure the government could find all the terrorist needles. In fact, there was no public outcry about this massive program after it was screamingly revealed on the front page of USA Today in May 2006.

When NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the same program in 2013, seven years later, the murders of 9/11 were much further in the past, and this time the information prompted greater public skepticism. This led to the passage of the haystack-limiting USA Freedom Act. But the key takeaway has to be that neither USA Today, nor Snowden, nor any investigative journalist since has shown that this program was being used for any purpose other

than to protect us from terrorists.

While there have been serious concerns about procedural abuse and unduly expansive interpretation of legal authority, the story has not been one of individuals targeted for political reasons or information being used for personal aggrandizement or enrichment, to chill free speech or to intimidate enemies. This is huge.

And it is not merely a coincidence. The massive system of post-9/11 safeguards appears to be working.

So, finally, the “safeguards” legacy of 9/11 is that the intelligence community and national security apparatus can operate within checks and balances developed and applied on a nonpartisan basis. Congress and the president have imposed meaningful and largely successful standards for rigorous Cabinetlevel approvals, judicial involvement, internal investigations, audits and transparency reports, as well as extensive independent oversight

by Congress and others.

There is no need to trade privacy for security. Rather, the post-9/11 record demonstrates that we can monitor aggressively if we also remain equally committed to the compensating system of checks, balances, oversight and other safeguards that can prevent abuses and excesses that would offend the values that make us Americans.

Let’s be sure we keep it that way. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Zuckerberg sets a vital example CATHERINE RAMPELL is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.

Facebook has already revolutionized how we communicate, network and keep tabs on our exes.

Might it — or at least its chief executive — soon “disrupt” parenting, too?

The other week, company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he planned to go on paternity leave. And not just for a few perfunctory days, mind you, but two whole months. (The company offers its U.S. employees up to four months of paid parental leave.)

It’s hard to overstate what a big deal this is.

Zuckerberg said this was a “very personal decision,” presumably based on what he and his wife believe is best for their family. But in making this choice so publicly, he’s also done a major solid for the men (and women, and children) of America.

That’s because he’s helping to finally destigmatize paternity leave.

Let’s be clear: Outside of the tech sector, relatively few Americans have access to paid family leave. Fewer than 1 in 6 U.S. firms offers paid paternity leave, according to recent surveys from the Society for Human Resource Management and the Families and Work Institute.

But even when men are offered paid leave, they usually don’t take it, or at least not for any substantial period of time. After California passed a law entitling

most workers, both male and female, to up to six weeks of paid family leave, the average father took a whopping 7.5 days off after the birth of a child.

These behaviors belie what men, especially young men, say they want.

In survey after survey, fathers express a desire to be more active co-parents and more present in their children’s lives. Today’s men actually report having more difficulty balancing work and family responsibilities, and more parenting-relating guilt, than women do.

Men today seem to be fighting the battles that women first waged more than a generation ago over how to be taken seriously in the office while remaining involved, committed caregivers at home. Men who request flexible schedules, family leave or other

accommodations risk being viewed as weak, unmasculine and insufficiently committed to their careers.

Such stigma hurts not only those frustrated, guilt-ridden fathers, but also children and beleaguered mothers. Research has shown that when women disproportionately take advantage of work-life accommodations, employers end up punishing women as a class, relegating them to so-called mommy tracks.

So how do you encourage more men to take advantage of familyfriendly policies when they’re actually offered?

Policy is one possible lever.

Various developed countries have tried making paternity leave mandatory; introducing a pool of paid parental leave available only to fathers; and giving mothers bonus weeks of maternity leave if fathers take a minimum amount of leave. Such actions have been associated with big increases in paternity leave takeup rates.

In the United States, we don’t even require employers to provide paid maternity leave, of course. So this kind of “daddy leave quota” would be great but remains several steps away.

The lever we do have is celebrity role models such as Zuckerberg.

In the months since Zuckerberg announced that his wife, Priscilla Chan, was expecting, news coverage has been filled with speculation, and hope, that he would announce a lengthy paternity leave. Not only because the social science research suggests that it would be good for his family (as he noted in his Facebook post about his decision), but also because doing so would help encourage others — both at Facebook and elsewhere — to accept that taking leave is okay.

And there’s good reason to believe that Zuckerberg’s precedent might affect how other men weigh their options. One study, using Norwegian data, found that men were significantly more likely to take paternity leave if they had a brother or co-worker who did so. The peer effect was 2.5 times larger when the peer father was the senior manager in a firm as opposed to a regular co-worker.

There have, of course, been other executives or public figures whose parental leave decisions have been the subject of public scrutiny, emulation and condemnation. But if you want to make parental leave seem simultaneously glamorous and normal, it’s hard to imagine a more effective national spokesman than this hoodied, self-made billionaire. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY MATT DAVIES

Students’ thin skin is our fault KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary In 2010.

It would be easy to call protesting college students crybabies and brats for pitching hissy fits over hurt feelings, but this likely would lead to such torrents of tearful tribulation that the nation’s university system would have to shut down for a prolonged period of grief counseling.

Besides, it would be insensitive.

Instead, let me be the first to say: It’s not the students’ fault. These serial tantrums are direct results of our Everybody Gets a Trophy culture and an educational system that mostly no longer teaches a core curriculum, including history, government and the Bill of Rights.

The students simply don’t know any better.

This isn’t necessarily to excuse them. Everyone has a choice whether to ignore a perceived slight — or to form a posse. But as with any problem, it helps to understand its source. The disease, I fear, was auto-induced with the zealous pampering of the American child that began a few decades ago.

The first sign of the epidemic of sensitivity we’re witnessing was when parents and teachers were instructed never to tell Johnny that he’s a “bad boy,” but that he’s “acting” like a bad boy.

Next, Johnny was handed a blue ribbon along with everyone else on the team even though he didn’t deserve one. Rather than protecting Johnny’s fragile selfesteem, the prize undermined

Johnny’s faith in his own perceptions and judgment. It robbed him of his ability to pick himself up when he fell and to be brave, honest and hardy in the face of adversity. Self-esteem is earned, not bestowed.

Today’s campuses are overrun with little Johnnys, their female counterparts and their adult enablers. How will we ever find enough fainting couches?

This is also not to diminish the pain of racism (or sexism, ageism, blondism or whatever -ism gets one’s tear ducts moistened). But nothing reported on campuses the past several weeks rises to the level of the coerced resignations of a university chancellor and president.

The affronts that prompted students to demand the resignations include: a possibly

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

off-campus, drive-by racial epithet apparently aimed at the student body president; another racial epithet , hurled by a drunk white student; a swastika drawn with feces in a dorm restroom.

Someone certainly deserves a spanking. But do such events mean that students have been neglected, as protesters have charged? Or that the school tolerates racism?

Concurrent with these episodes of outrage is the recent surge on campuses of “trigger warnings” in syllabuses to alert students to content that might be upsetting, and “safe spaces ” where students can seek refuge when ideas make them uncomfortable. It seems absurd to have to mention that the purpose of higher education is to be challenged, to be exposed to different views and, above all, to be exhilarated by the exercise of free speech — other people’s as well as one’s own.

The marketplace of ideas is not for sissies, in other words. And it would appear that knowledge, the curse of the enlightened, is not for everyone.

The latter is meant to be an observation, but on many college campuses today, it seems to be an operating principle. A recent survey of 1,100 colleges and universities found that only 18

percent require American history or government, where such foundational premises as the First Amendment might be explained and understood.

The survey, by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, assesses schools according to whether they have at least one required course in composition, foreign language at the intermediate level, American government or history, economics, science, mathematics and literature. Coincidentally, the very institutions where students are dominating what passes for debate also scored among the worst: University of Missouri, D; Yale University, C; Dartmouth College, C; and Princeton University, C — all for requiring only one or a few of the subjects.

Amherst College scored an F for requiring none of them.

Such is the world we’ve created for young people who soon enough will discover that the world doesn’t much care about their tender feelings. But before such harsh realities knock them off their ponies, we might hope that they redirect their anger.

They have every right to despise the coddling culture that ill prepared them for life and an educational system that failed to teach them what they need.

Weep for them — and us. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

CITY

SNOB

TRENDS

Roadsnacks, a data analysis firm in Durham, N.C., dedicated to making “infotainment about where you live that your real estate agent won’t tell you,” each year ranks 250 U.S. cities by snobbiness. The criteria include median home price, median household income, percent of population with a college degree, and private schools, theaters, art galleries and Whole Foods Markets per capita.

The top five snobbiest U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 or more:

1

2

3

4

5

San Francisco

Berkeley, Calif.

Pasadena, Calif.

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Seattle

Population: 817,755

Population: 112,662

Population: 139,316

Population: 222,867

Population: 615,916

Median household income: $73,802

Median household income: $63,505

Median household income: $68,310

Median household income: $72,613

Median household income: $63,470

Median home price: $750,000

Median home price: $707,000

Median home price: $620,600

Median home price: $396,700

Median home price: $441,000

Roadsnacks says:

Berkeley has one of the highest numbers of private schools per capita in the nation.

Home of the Rose Parade, Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Lab and the Norton Simon Museum.

Known for its destination spas.

Roadsnacks says:

“There are snooty places, there are snobby places, and then there’s San Francisco.”

“Nordstrom is headquartered there.

That’s so snobtastic.”

The five least snobby U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 or more: 1. Brownsville, Tex.

2. Kansas City, Kan.

SOURCES: ROADSNACKS, AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY, YELP; ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCKPHOTO

3. Pasadena, Tex.

4. Laredo, Tex.

5. Warren, Mich.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

24

Foothills Magazine presents its 4th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine! Photos will be judged in two categories – human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at ncwfoothills.com/photocontest Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2016

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine foothills.wenatcheeworld.com