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The murder of Ethan Rivera on North Graham Street in February spurred calls for more safety measures for CATS employees. (Photo by Ryan Pitkin)

On March 3, nearly three weeks after the murder of Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) bus operator Ethan Rivera led to calls for enhanced safety measures on public transit, the official CATS Twitter account tweeted out three grainy surveillance photos showing federal agents patrolling the Uptown transit center.

As CATS continues to support and provide additional security resources, we have been able to partner with the Department of Homeland Securitys local Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response team, the tweet read. The local VIPR team may be present on CATS property at any place and time.

This was news to at least one member of the Transit Services Advisory Committee (TSAC), which advises CATS. She hadnt heard of any such partnership, but the idea of federal agents roaming CATS property brought up a few questions she wouldve liked to see answered before they were deployed.

Whats the message that sends? she asked Queen City Nerve during a recent phone call. What are they empowered to do? What are they not empowered to do? How long will they be here? Are they armed? How are they armed? What are the rules of engagement here?

Those are just a few of the questions that came to mind for the TSAC member, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions within the committee.

She also worried how the presence of VIPR agents may lead to over-policing at the transit stations, bringing up concerns about racial profiling, the criminalization of homelessness, immigration enforcement, and other issues.

I know the drivers are concerned for their safety and I know passengers have been concerned for their safety, she told Queen City Nerve. I think the issue really is, when you bring in federal law enforcement, might that have a chilling effect on ridership? We need some transparency.

Others in the community have similar concerns, not only with the VIPR team deployment but with a muddled policing picture that sees three different law enforcement agencies policing certain CATS properties independently from one another.

VIPR teams were formed under the Department of Homeland Securitys Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as a response to the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

Following the Madrid train bombing, TSA developed the VIPR Program to allow TSA law enforcement and security assets to augment federal, state, and local law enforcement and security agencies in the transportation domain, a TSA spokesperson wrote to Queen City Nerve.

The teams operate in mass transit, rail, air and maritime transportation spaces.

For years VIPR seemingly bumbled along, making headlines for incidents that caused tension with local law enforcement agencies.

VIPR began life as a modern version of the Keystone Kops, wrote Trains Magazine reporter Don Phillips in a 2012 op-ed for CNN, referring to the fictional gang of incompetent policemen featured in silent film slapstick comedies in the 1910s.

In 2011, Amtrak police chief John OConnor banned VIPR from all Amtrak facilities after a team inexplicably took over a station in Savannah, Georgia, and searched everyone coming in and out of the facility. No security issue to justify the action was ever presented.

TSA issued an apology for the incident, though OConnor would not accept it, stating that the agency continued to put forward inaccuracies in its own version of events.

Private railroads have repeatedly refused TSAs requests for VIPR teams to be given access to their properties, stating that it is too dangerous for agents who arent trained to operate in railyards.

Though VIPR has mostly stayed out of headlines in more recent years, they do make for an imposing presence that raises questions in cities where they appear. In 2019 alone, we found stories from Portland, Maine; Dallas, Texas; and San Francisco that reported how citizens had become alarmed when federal agents began showing up on public transportation.

Civil rights groups have voiced concerns that VIPR teams are the TSAs way of expanding its power to carry out searches and seizures that would otherwise be unlawful.

This is a classic case of the slippery slope, wrote Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union in 2011. The Fourth Amendment says that the government cannot carry out a search without probable cause. Over the years, the courts have carved an exception to that plain language for airports, where the government can carry out a limited administrative search solely for the purpose of protecting the safety of air travel (it cannot be a general law enforcement stop).

But the TSA is trying to expand and manipulate that exception for law enforcement purposes and drive a permanent hole in the Fourth Amendment, he continued.

On Feb. 11, the community was shocked when CATS bus operator Ethan Rivera was shot and killed during an apparent road rage incident near the intersection of North Graham and West Trade streets.

The suspect, later identified as 21-year-old Darian Dru Thavychith, allegedly shot Rivera multiple times through his driver-side window without ever leaving his car. Police arrested Thavychith on March 1 and charged him with murder and shooting into occupied property.

Riveras killing sparked outrage among CATS employees, who in the weeks following the shooting held rallies at the scene of the incident and outside of Charlotte City Council meetings. They spoke at public forums, calling for CATS CEO John Lewis resignation and more comprehensive safety measures for drivers.

At a meeting on Feb. 28, CATS bus operator Gia Lockhart told Mayor Vi Lyles and Charlotte City Council members that she and other colleagues had also been assaulted while on the job and no longer felt safe.

Mayor, I love my city and I love my job, but you are allowing this man right here to bring it down, she said, pointing to Lewis, who was sitting nearby.

Three days previously on Feb. 25, Lewis had put out a press release addressing rampant speculation regarding the safety of CATS bus operators and our transit system, stating that CATS had done an audit of its bus fleet and replaced 11 defective radios and would be working with the SMART labor union to create more solutions.

Inquiries to SMART labor reps for this story went unanswered.

On March 3, @CATSRideTransit tweeted out the surveillance photos of VIPR teams deployed at the Uptown transit center.

In an email response to inquiries from Queen City Nerve, a spokesperson with the CATS Office of Safety and Security (OSS) stated that CATS has been working with DHS for several years through this program, though they did not specify how many years.

But in a tweet on March 15, CATS implied that the VIPR team deployment was a response to Ethan Riveras murder.

Responding to a Twitter user who asked what CATS had done since Riveras killing to ensure better safety for its drivers, CATS responded: Since the incident regarding bus operator Ethan Rivera, CMPD has added patrols of the Charlotte Transit Center and bus routes. Department of Homeland Security Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams will now be making random visits and patrol CATS facilities.

Follow-up tweets stated that CATS was also adding additional Allied Universal resources for all bus facilities and routes while working with CMPD to identify and implement de-escalation training for bus operators and CATS frontline employees.

In an email to Queen City Nerve, the CATS OSS Spokesperson wrote, In addition to working with our partners, the CMPD Transit Police Officers assigned to CATS are making checks of bus drivers and walking through buses at various locations throughout the city. Allied Universal guards working at all our parking decks have been instructed to conduct driver and bus checks when they see a bus during their patrol of the decks.

They would not specify the specific roles that their VIPR partners with the DHS were assigned to carry out.

Bus operators have called for increased security at transit stations and on public transit vehicles in the wake of Ethan Riveras murder, but it gets foggy as to whos in charge of that. For example, there are three separate agencies in charge of enforcing the law at the Transit Center.

CATS hires out the private security firm Allied Universal to provide armed security at its facilities and on trains and buses, while CMPD also patrols the station and now federal agents with TSAs VIPR teams will have a presence.

For Robert Dawkins, political director with Action NC, the crowded nature of policing at the transit center is problematic at a time when his organization and others have been working with the city on a Reimagining Policing initiative that includes 8 Cant Wait reforms and other changes in how CMPD operates.

He points out that bringing in outside agencies, be they federal or private, can muddle up those efforts.

Our main thing of course is safety thats whether were talking about police accountability, neighborhood safety or any infrastructure that the city provides, Dawkins said. We already had a problem that the Transit Center is outsourced to private security. As hard as we and other groups work to make sure that public safety, specifically as its run by CMPD, is fair were starting things like the Safe Communities group to make sure that the public is safe and private security does not have to live up to the vision of safety that we push for or city council is pushing for. So weve always had a problem with private security.

A CMPD spokesperson confirmed to Queen City Nerve that neither Allied Universal guards nor DHS agents operate under CMPD directives, though both organizations are required to operate within federal and North Carolina law.

Dawkins said the deployment of VIPR teams brings up new issues, as the Department of Homeland Security also oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raising concerns about whether agents will have the power to enforce immigration laws at the station.

In Charlotte, city council has always used the cover of, We dont enforce immigration laws, thats not us, were not having anything to do with that, Dawkins said. So who decided to let transit go out and work a deal to have DHS do security out there when now the citys going to be tied into whatever they do to enforce immigration policy?

When asked what authority VIPR has at facilities like the transit center, whether they are tasked with reacting to crimes as they occur or will carry out proactive measures such as searches of suspicious persons, a CATS OSS spokesperson responded over email, Local law enforcement is present to enforce the laws and address any criminal behavior observed.

When asked about what rules of engagement or other directives VIPR will work under in Charlotte, the spokesperson responded, Local law enforcement will enforce the laws and address observed criminal behavior.

When asked whether VIPR will enforce immigration laws at CATS facilities, the spokesperson responded, Local law enforcement are present with the team and they will enforce laws and address any observed criminal behavior.

Dawkins said he has been assured by city officials that VIPR will not enforce immigration laws, as they operate under the TSA and not ICE. However, he and his team, which has a presence at the transit center doing community outreach around issues like vaccines and voter registration, will keep a close eye on it.

The same way that we went after the sheriffs department for 287(g) [a partnership between the Mecklenburg County Sheriffs Office and ICE that was terminated in 2019] we dont want to but we would be prepared to wage a campaign against [CATS] in the city over that if we see that it leads to discrimination against specifically the Latinx community, or if our people that we have down there say that theyre doing citizenship checks, Dawkins said. Thats going to be a major issue for us that we will have to address legally.

Even with three law enforcement agencies holding jurisdiction over CATS facilities such as the transit center, CATS employees continue to say they do not feel safe on the job.

Queen City Nerve spoke with bus operator Gia Lockhart over the phone in March, a couple of weeks after her speech at the Feb. 28 Charlotte City Council meeting. She said that over her eight-year tenure with CATS, shes noticed a deterioration.

The morale on the job has gone down, she said. The delinquency and the loitering, the prostitution, the drugs, everything as far as crime-related has gotten worse at the transit center and on the buses for the drivers and the passengers.

Lockhart said she hadnt seen any DHS agents at the transit center, only Allied Security, but even with them keeping a relatively strong presence at the transit center, she feels unsafe at other stations, including the light rail stations where she has bus stops but has never seen any law enforcement.

Lockhart said fixing the broken bus radios was a step in the right direction, but she hopes the city can work more money into the upcoming Fiscal Year 2023 budget to fund more comprehensive safety measures.

She supports city council member Tariq Bokharis pitch to install bulletproof barriers in each bus between the driver and the riders, though if that measure is explored further by council, she said she would want it to be expanded to include bulletproof windshields and driver-side windows.

Lockhart would also like to see a fixed presence for CMPD or MCSO that includes an office in the transit center, and she wants to bring CATS employees efforts statewide, lobbying state legislators to pass a law making it a hate crime to attack transit drivers.

Provisions added into President Joe Bidens infrastructure law, signed in November, were meant to protect transit workers, but transit unions have recently complained that the Federal Transit Administration is yet to implement or enforce the protections.

Lockhart remains optimistic that, with it being an election year, local officials will be more apt to listen to the demands of her and her colleagues.

At the end of the day, we are literally right there on the front lines, just as well as police and fire and Medic, Lockhart said. We might have a different job description but were right there with the people, and we just dont get the respect that we feel like we deserve, nor the pay.

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VIPR Team Deployed in Charlotte, Muddling Up CATS Policing Further - qcnerve.com

There are few institutions as culturally sacrosanct and legally violated as the American family. Each year child welfare authorities separate half a million children from their parents. The system disproportionately affects Black families. More than one in ten Black children in the United States will be forcibly separated from their parents and placed in foster care before they reach adulthood. Most of these removals are not motivated by allegations of violence or abuse, but by charges of neglect, which could be anything from children not having enough food to them being left at home alone. Insecure housing is one of the primary reason parents are accused of child neglect. But child welfare agencies dont help families find housing or provide material resources to children. Rather, they threaten families with the trauma of separation and often exacerbate the very problems they claim to solve.

Every single aspect of the child welfare system has a procedural analog in the criminal punishment system.

For more than two decades, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has been studying the U.S. child welfare system and how it punishes parentspoor Black and Native parents especiallyfor exposing their children to the harms of inequality. In her new book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Familiesand How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), Roberts explains how we got here and what must be done to affect change. Weaving together history, social science research, and decades of expertise as a child welfare scholar, Roberts reveals a devastating truth: rather than invest in children and families safety and wellbeing, we have erected a child welfare system that uses family policing as the primary means to address the needs of marginalized children. This was not done by accident, but by design. Torn Apart takes readers through the history of family separation and child welfare policy, exposing how slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, and policing shaped the system we have today. To describe the contrast between the child welfare systems child saving rhetoric and its record of producing horrific, even deadly outcomes, Roberts uses the phrase benevolent terror. With this term, she captures how the brutality of the system is obscured and excused by paternalistic claims of protecting innocents. But, for all its power, this system is not operating without challenge. Roberts tells stories of Black mothers, caregivers, and advocates fighting to abolish family policing. Inspired by the principles and strategies of prison and police abolitionists, these organizers are building a world that meets childrens needs without criminalizing their caregivers, that exposes the terror of family separation and the trauma of foster care, and that radically reimagines the way we invest in the safety and wellbeing of children.

Nia Evans: Torn Apart is a damning indictment of our states approach to child welfare. It exposes what most people consider to be a well-intentioned system of child protection as a sprawling family policing system that terrorizes and destroys Black families. Could you talk about why you felt it was important to write this book right now?

Dorothy Roberts: I wrote a book on this topic twenty years ago, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001). At the time many child welfare researchers were trying to explain away the racism in the system by claiming that the child welfare agencies were simply responding to the greater needs of Black children. Although these researchersI call them disparity defenders in Torn Apartare still publishing these arguments, a new group of social scientists has recently emerged that is investigating how child welfare agencies police Black and Native families. A lot more research documents the astounding extent of surveillance conducted by this system and the trauma and other harms inflicted on children placed in foster care, especially those who are confined to prison-like institutional settings. I believe that there needs to be an organized movement to abolish what most people call the child welfare system but what is actually a family policing system.

So Ive solidified an abolitionist perspective over the last twenty years. I participated in numerous reform efforts to improve foster care, eliminate the racial disparities, and reduce the size of the foster care population. None worked to make a substantial difference. I became convinced that we cant tinker with a state surveillance system designed at its roots to subjugate Black communities. We must abolish and replace it.

As the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex expanded dramatically, I learned tremendously from its theorizing, principles, and organizing. It helped me to see the need to dismantle the family policing system and to articulate the aim in the terms of abolition.

I call our current child welfare system a family policing system because it was designed and operates to police families. When allegations of child abuse or neglect are received by this system, it does not respond by seeking to provide the resources that families need. It treats these allegations as accusations against parents. It investigates them and monitors families, sometimes for years on end, with extremely intensive surveillance into every aspect of their private lives, far more than a police arrest would trigger. That same system, in many cases, forcibly removes children from their homes, which is a form of terror and trauma to the children and their caregivers. It then puts children into a violent foster care system that itself is structured to harm children and to increase the chances that they will be put into juvenile detention or prison. Thats why this is not a social services or welfare system; its a policing system that operates with its own type of policing agents, investigators, punitive courts, parole, and probation officers. Every single aspect of the child welfare system has a procedural analog in the criminal punishment system.

At the founding of the United States, the forced separation of Black families planted the idea that Black parents are incapable of taking care of their children and that white people should be able to take Black children away from their parents.

Part of the reason this system doesnt generate widespread attention and alarm is because theres been such an effective propaganda machine that fools people into thinking its a benevolent system that helps children and families. That veneer of benevolence is starting to shatter both because of organizing by people who have been terrorized and traumatized by the system, but also because of developments like Texas Governor Greg Abbotts recent directive to child protective agents to investigate the families of trans children who receive gender affirming care. Here we can also look to the separation of migrant families at the border that was accelerated under the Trump Administration. More and more people are seeing how child protection agencies are used as an instrument of repression by the state. My book aims to dispel the notion that these are aberrational instances. This is what the system was always designed to do, and it is inflicting this kind of terror and disruption disproportionately on Black communities every day. For all those reasons and more, this is an important moment to organize resistance to this system and to build a radically different approach to taking care of children and supporting families.

NE: I want to take a step back. The current logic of what most folks know as the child welfare system is that keeping children safe requires removing them from their parents and placing them with alternative caregivers. Theres so much historical context bound up in that premise. Can you walk us through it? How did we end up with a child welfare system based on removal, surveillance, and separation?

DR: Its simply a myth that the child welfare system has ever been about rescuing needy children from violent parents and putting them with more loving and caring caregivers. That has never been the purpose or design of the child welfare system. To understand why it operates in such a violent way todayin a way that relies absolutely on either the threat of taking children or removing children from the homeyou must go back to its origins. From the beginning the child welfare system was designed to oppress politically marginalized and disenfranchised communities, mainly Black and Native communities. It has been a form of state disruption and control from its very origins and an avenue for private charities and later state agencies to deal with poverty in a punitive way.

To understand how we got here, we must go back to the enslavement of African people in the United States and the legal right of white enslavers to separate family members at will without any regard whatsoever for family relationships or any notion of a right to family autonomy. Under the slavery system, the white head of the plantation family had control over everyone and, if it was economically or otherwise convenient, he could sell off members of Black families. So at the very beginning of what became the United States, the forced separation of Black families planted the idea that Black parents are incapable of taking care of their children, that they should have no authority over their children, and that white people should be able to come in and take Black children away from their parents. The disparaging and discounting of Black family bonds facilitates that mentality and, even today, bolsters the child welfare system, which takes Black children away from their parents at higher rates than white children in the United States, and at astronomical rates in general.

The child welfare system is also built on the history of the U.S. military deploying child removal as a weapon of war to decimate Indigenous tribes. Dispossession of children occurred alongside dispossession of land. Family separation was and is a tool of war and subjugation. Those aspects of the child welfare system are usually ignored when its advocates discuss its origins. The systems roots arent in rescuing children, but in forcibly taking children.

Child welfare ideology blames parents for the realities imposed by structural inequality; punishes them; removes their children; stigmatizes them; and, ultimately, produces even greater hardships for their children.

Even when we look at the formal child welfare system that developed from the Elizabethan poor laws, that traveled from England to the colonies, the focus was on putting impoverished families, children along with their parents, in poorhouses. The foster care system was introduced in the nineteenth century as a reform, but it retained a similar ideology. Instead of institutionalizing entire families, the reform removed impoverished children (mostly European immigrant children) from their families and put them into homes to work for other people. This strategy included what were called orphan trains, where thousands of impoverished children were put on trains in Eastern cities, like New York City, and sent to work on farms in the Midwest and the Southwest. None of that was truly about rescuing children to improve their welfare. It was a violent, punitive way of handling childhood poverty by taking children away from their families instead of developing policies that would end poverty. It had nothing to do with a protective state ensuring the wellbeing of these children.

NE: I want to dig into that point about the interests of children because this is a terrible country in which to be a child. We do the bare minimum for children and families here.

One study by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that among thirty-one countriesincluding the United States, Canada, and the European statesthe United States had the highest child poverty rate. Even now, after the pandemic has pushed millions into poverty, the child tax credit that passed as a part of the American Rescue Plan and kept 3,000,000 children out of poverty is politically dead and seems unlikely to be renewed any time soon. Can you talk about how our collective failure to invest in the wellbeing of children and families plays out in the family policing system?

DR: Not only is child removal used as a weapon of war and subjugation against disenfranchised communities, but it is also an ideological way of blaming the most disadvantaged parents for problems they did not create. Our society is structured to put people in poverty and keep them there; to deny opportunities to Black children and families; and to put children and families in dangerous, unhealthy conditions to maintain the power of a white elite.

Child welfare ideology blames parents for the realities imposed by structural inequality; punishes them; removes their children; stigmatizes them; and, ultimately, produces even greater hardships for their children because the foster care system pushes Black children into juvenile detention and prison. Foster care disrupts childrens lives. It traumatizes them. It disrupts their education and healthcare. It ruptures their social relationships with their families, friends, classmates, and neighbors. And somehow, despite its repressive design and disastrous outcomes, its seen as a system that helps these children. Its a deeply devious system that causes so much harm, not only to the individuals who are entangled in it, but also to the possibilities of social change that would benefit everyone in this nation.

NE: I want to discuss how and why this system functions as an extension of the carceral state. You write, family policing targets Black families in particular and relies on racist beliefs about Black family dysfunction to justify its terror. It is deeply entangled with cops, criminal courts, and prisons, forming an integrated arm of the U.S. carceral regime and that foster care is one of the chief ways the U.S. state transfers the carceral containment of Black communities from one generation to the next. Can you talk more about those relationships?

DR: There are so many parallels between the punitive, accusatory, surveillance nature of the family policing system and the criminal legal system. But the two systems are also deeply entangled. When caseworkers go to investigate a family, especially a Black family in a segregated neighborhoodwhich is where most of their operations are concentratedthey often will bring a police officer with them. This enhances the terror of a child welfare investigation. I tell a story in Torn Apart about a police officer who killed a Black father while accompanying a caseworker on her visit. They both entered the home, and when the father tried to run away, he was shot and killed. Parents are often frightened or intimidated into agreeing to let caseworkers and officers into their home without a warrant. Child welfare agencies operate as if theres a Fourth Amendment exemption for child protection workers, even though there isnt. And police officers often ignore Fourth Amendment requirements that are regularly recognized for them to search a home by tagging along with caseworkers who rarely obtain a warrant before they knock on someones door.

We would be able to release thousands of children from foster care if their families had adequate housing.

Theres also a dangerous amount of information gathering that happens on these visits by law enforcement and child welfare agencies. Child protection agencies are increasingly using artificial intelligence, big databases, and algorithms to identify families to investigate, mirroring computerized data systems that police departments use. These databases include information thats already structured to be biased against Black people.

NE: In that veinof government agencies using big tech to investigate and criminalize familiescan you talk about the amount of profit in the family policing system? Just how profitable is this system?

DR: Another unacknowledged aspect of the history of child welfare is what happened after the Civil War. Many people know that states used the convict leasing system, Black codes, and prisons to get around the Thirteenth Amendment and recapture Black labor. We hear less about the forced apprenticing of Black children. To me that is the origin of the formal child welfare system for Black families because it was court-imposed indenture of Black children back to their former enslavers by the thousands. Under both existing child neglect laws and new laws in some states, courts could rule Black parents neglectful and indenture their children to white people for their welfare. And many children were sent right back to the plantations and farms where they had been forced to work prior to the abolition of slavery.

There was also a period between the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement when Black children were virtually excluded from formal child welfare services. At that time the primary focus was providing services to impoverished white families that were kept intact. There wasnt a lot of removal of children from their homes. It wasnt until Black people demanded equal access to government funded services and began to obtain welfare benefits that the policy changed. Welfare policies allowed Southern states to push Black children and their single mothers off the welfare rolls by finding that the mothers were not providing so-called suitable homes. In the 1960s the policy required that, if the mother was not providing a suitable home, then the child must be placed in foster care. As a result, between the 1970s and 1990s, we see an explosion of foster care. We also see a huge increase in federal funding going to maintaining children outside their homes, rather than providing services to children in the home. To me this is such a clear reflection of the political decision to turn child welfare into a multibillion dollar foster care industry by removing Black children from their homesthat shift in policy from providing white children services within their homes to relying primarily on foster care when it came to Black children.

By the 1990s there was a massive, sprawling foster care industry and, over the course of the next several decades, states increasingly turned to private foster care companies to run their programs. These companies take children who are identified by caseworkers to be removed from their homes and place them with foster caretakers that have been recruited, selected, and paid by those same companies. And the more children in foster care, the more money these companies make from government contracts. The very real financial incentive for these private companies to ignore harms to children in foster care has been documented time and time again. Even state child welfare departments have a vested financial interest in this system. Thousands of administrators, caseworkers, investigators, and therapists are earning money from keeping children in foster care. The state also makes money by becoming the financial representative of children in foster care and taking their Social Security disability and survivor benefits.

NE: I was stunned by that fact: childrens federal benefits, or the money left to them by their families, can be legally taken by companies and states when they are in foster care. The claim is that it is reimbursement for their time in foster care.

DR: That is the justification that states use to steal the money from these children. Theyll say that they are reimbursing themselves for the cost of foster care. Remember that agencies receive federal, state, and local funding to pay for foster care costs. There is no reason why they should be reimbursed by children. They should not be able to take anything from the children. Andeven if you entertained that ideaits not as though they put the money in an account on behalf of the children. That money goes into the city or states coffers. They even use that money, in some cases, to balance the budget. I write about the Maryland Department of Human Services hiring a company called Maximus, a private contractor, to find children whose benefits they could take to close budget shortfalls. There has also been a wealth of reporting children who age out of the foster care system only to find out that they should have had a trust fund with thousands of dollars in benefits that should have been kept for them but was instead stolen over the course of their time in foster care.

NE: Has reform made a dent in these problems?

DR: There have been so many reforms in this space over the last fifty years. Foster care itself was a reforma transition from poorhouses where parents and children were institutionalized and forced to labor together. Since I wrote Shattered Bonds, racial disproportionality in the child welfare system has been noted and there have been countless efforts to shrink the disparities. But the system continues to operate the way that it always hastargeting and disrupting Black families and their communities. I could give a litany of reforms. Ive engaged in numerous class action lawsuits that have been filed against child welfare departments and consent decrees that have been issued by courts for decades. None of these efforts have changed the systems fundamental design.

You cant fix a system that is doing what it was designed to do: oppress Black, Indigenous, and impoverished communities. The only way to stop that is to build a completely different approach, one that isnt based on threats to families, doesnt confuse poverty and child neglect, and doesnt blame parents for structural injuries to their children.

NE: How do we build a world that abolishes the family policing system and invests in child welfare?

DR: Ensuring the concrete resources and income that families need is a better way to invest in childrens welfare and safety. That would keep children safer from a variety of harmsbe it poverty, structural racism, or even violence in a home. Harms to children would be drastically reduced if we invested in community-based resources that meet families needs, such as high-quality housing, childcare, and health care.

NE: None of which are things that caseworkers can provide.

DR: Caseworkers cant provide any of that. Caseworkers mandate therapy, parent training courses, and supervised visitation with children. Meanwhile, we would be able to release thousands of children from foster care if their families had adequate housing. Providing concrete resources not only meets immediate needs, but also relieves stress in families. It gives children opportunities that they dont have in foster care, not to mention the ability to have relationships with their families. Thats something that gets left out so much in these discussions, as if theres no value to Black family relationships. Family bonds are extremely valuable and important to childrens welfare.

Instead of relying on family policing, we should build mutual aid networks in communities that provide what families need on a voluntary basis.

Instead of relying on family policing, we should build mutual aid networks in communities that provide what families need on a voluntary basis. Instead of spending billions of dollarssome estimates are as high as $30 billionon a child welfare system that prioritizes maintaining children outside of the home, we should devote that money to income supports and high-quality living conditions that facilitate nurturing and safe environments for children and families. Rather than relying on prisons, police, and child welfare agencies, we should utilize the wisdom of anti-carceral feminists, many of whom are survivors of violence themselves, and embrace transformative justice processes that seek to prevent violence by understanding why violence occurs in families, holding the people who commit violence accountable, and working to heal relationships. We can reduce violence substantially by abandoning the current approach, which makes mothers afraid to report violence in the homeeven against themselvesfor fear that caseworkers will take their children away. This happens all the time. In some jurisdictions merely reporting violence in the home is considered grounds to take children away and put them into a violent foster care system.

It doesnt need to be this way. Black communities have a long history of addressing childrens needs within the community. We had to figure this out because, until the 1960s, we were virtually excluded from the child welfare system. Theres a long history of Black midwives attending to childrens births and care, of Black club women coming together to provide voluntary services for children and young parents, and of Black mutual aid networks meeting families material needs. Just look at the Black Panthers who provided breakfast and healthcare to children free of charge. There are so many examples of Black community members coming together to care for children and families. We can expand these efforts by applying the same visions, principles, and organizing behind prison and police abolition to the abolition of family policing.

NE: So much of the family policing system hinges on violent legal systems. What role do you think the law can play in struggles for racial and family justice?

DR: The family policing system is a good example of the kind of structural oppression that critical race theory has always highlighted and sought to understand. Black families have been disparaged and subjugated since the time of slavery and those efforts have been embedded in institutions, including legal institutions. One way we can move toward family policing abolition is by embracing what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls non-reformist reforms. These are reforms aimed at the horizon of abolition and the process of dismantling and replacing carceral systems entirely.

One of the most important non-reformist reforms is legislation that guarantees the rights of parents and other family caregivers, including providing them high quality, multidisciplinary legal defense from the beginning of child welfare investigationsthat means before a caseworker enters a home and threatens to take children away. As I mentioned before, the Fourth Amendment applies to caseworkers working for the state. Requiring them to get a warrant before searching homes and to give Miranda warnings to parents to let them know they have the right to an attorney before they say anything to caseworkers is critical, and so is supporting family defender servicesunits of attorneys, social workers, and parent advocates who specialize in defending families in child welfare proceedings. These legal advocates reject the idea that the interests of children run contrary to those of their parents and aim to defend the family as a whole. They are creating innovative ways of providing holistic services, not only legal representation in court, but also helping families find housing, childcare, and other resources they need to stay out of the clutches of the child welfare system.

NE: Can you tell me a bit about one of the organizers in this space who inspired you? How did their experience with the family policing system shape their advocacy?

DR: Organizing by parents and youth with entanglements in the system has grown over the last two decades, with Black mothers at the forefront. There are so many people organizing to dismantle the family policing system who inspire me! But one who stands out is Joyce McMillan, an amazing parent activist who founded and directs JMacForFamilies in New York City. I open my last chapter of Torn Apart with a story about her. She became an activist after New Yorks Administration for Childrens Services (ACS) took her baby girl in 1999, triggered by an anonymous call to the hotline reporting her for drug use. It took her two years to recover her daughter, when she obtained legal representation by the Family Defense Practice at Brooklyn Defender Services. Her destructive experience with ACS motivated her to work at the nonprofit Child Welfare Organizing Project in Harlem and later to found her own organization in 2019, which works to abolish the current punitive system and create an approach that truly supports families and builds community.

You cant fix a system that is doing what it was designed to do: oppress Black, Indigenous, and impoverished communities.

I love Ms. McMillans forthright condemnation of family policing and creative strategizing to undo it. Under her direction JMacForFamilies has led influential grassroots campaigns to call attention to and dismantle ACS. She created Parent Legislative Action Network (PLAN), a coalition of family defenders, professors, and parent activists, to promote laws to protect families from ACS. She has also held rallies and posted billboards with brilliant messages like Some Cops Are Called Caseworkers and They Separate Children at the Border of Harlem, Too. I feel honored to work with activists like Ms. McMillan in the struggle to abolish family policing and build a safer, more humane, and caring world.

Read more from the original source:
The Benevolent Terror of the Child Welfare System - Boston Review

JOLIET, IL A 47-year-old California man who had nearly 23 lbs of methamphetamine seized from his car by the Will County Sheriff's Office last September was the subject of an illegal and improper search, Will County Judge Vincent Cornelius ruled.

On Wednesday morning, Assistant Will County State's Attorney Tom Bahar appeared in Courtroom 404 informing Cornelius that Henry Duenas is being released from custody at the Will County Jail and his two Class X felonies are being dismissed.

Duenas was in the Will County Jail for more than six months, facing a $1 million bail. Last week, Cornelius announced the search was illegal, and the evidence was inadmissible.

On Sept. 27, the Will County State's Attorney's Office of Jim Glasgow charged Duenas with two Class X felonies, unlawful possession of methamphetamine with intent to deliver and unlawful possession of methamphetamine.

According to Duenas' lawyer, Daniel Walsh, the illegal search of his client's four-door sedan involved three Will County Sheriff's deputies and took place around 2 p.m. near Interstate 80 and Interstate 55. Duenas turned on to I-55 heading north toward Chicago when a Will County Sheriff's deputy pulled him over.

Last September, the Will County Sheriff's Office announced the drug seizure by posting a news release on its Facebook page including photos of the meth that was confiscated.

But, the Will County Sheriff's Office investigation collapsed after the judge determined the I-55 vehicle search was illegal.

"Mr. Duenas, you got the benefit of a very fine lawyer," the judge remarked Wednesday morning.

After his arrest, Duenas hired the Law Offices of Daniel M. Walsh. In January, the downtown Joliet lawyer filed a motion to suppress the evidence. The reason for the traffic stop was an alleged turning signal violation.

According to Walsh's motion to suppress:

Deputy Daniel Budde stopped the California man for a turning signal violation on Sept. 26 and insisted Duenas come back to the sheriff's vehicle so he could write him a warning ticket. Budde then asked Duenas several questions about his travel and purpose of travel.

Budde asked Duenas if he had anything illegal in his vehicle, and Duenas replied he did not. When Budde asked for permission to search the vehicle, Duenas declined to give Will County permission for a search.

When two more Will County Sheriff's deputies arrived at the scene, Budde told them that Duenas "had inconsistent stories about his travels" and that he was just finishing up his tickets as Budde began walking back to his squad car, where Duenas remained.

Then, one of the sheriff's deputies proclaimed, "Smell like weed?"

"Huh?" Budde replied.

"Smell like weed!" the deputy repeated.

"Yeah," Budde agreed.

According to Walsh, neither the second nor third Will County Sheriff's deputy went anywhere near his client's vehicle before searching it for drugs.

"Deputy Budde never asked defendant if he was using cannabis or had smoked cannabis," Walsh argued. "Deputy Budde never remarked that defendant smelled like cannabis, never remarked that defendant's vehicle smelled like cannabis and never noted any indication that defendant was under the influence of cannabis.

"The first and only mention of cannabis was from the second deputy who never got close to the vehicle."

Walsh's motion to suppress the evidence noted that no marijuana was found in Duenas' vehicle.

"There was no probable cause to search defendant's vehicle," Walsh argued. "Defendant indicated that he had nothing illegal and denied the officer consent to search. There was no warrant out for the defendant's arrest."

Walsh reminded the judge that the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the search and seizure of people without a lawfully issued search and or arrest warrant or a reasonable articulable suspicion of criminal activity.

"We appreciate Judge Cornelius' time and we feel it was a fair ruling," Walsh told Joliet Patch on Wednesday.

Joliet Patch has reached out to Will County Sheriff's Office for reaction to Wednesday's decision to dismiss the Class X drug charges against Duenas.

Before Wednesday's hearing ended, Cornelius told Duenas, who lives in Desert Hot Springs, California, that he's very lucky his felony drug trafficking case was dismissed. The judge also told him he's got a lot of problems in life that he needs to address.

Read the original here:
Charges Dropped After Giant Meth Seizure By Will County Sheriffs - Patch

Mar. 31OSKALOOSA Fresh off a trip to state last season, the Oskaloosa boys golf team will have to replace their top two guys from that squad while returning the rest of their varsity lineup and welcoming a big group vying for some playing time.

"We have 31 guys out so numbers is a big strength," Oskaloosa head coach Bret Foster said. "We also have four guys returning that played at the state tournament last year and a bunch of guys that are competitive and ready to take on some bigger roles. This is the first year in a while that I am not sure who will be on varsity, so I'm not sure if that's good or bad."

Oskaloosa will return the likes of Keaton Flaherty (91.5 18-hole average), Tucker DeJong (89.5), Johnathon Terpstra (88.1), Ryan Carriker (97.1) and Caleb Cohrt (108) to the squad. All five will have a chance to step back into a varsity role this spring and improve upon their games.

Joining them is a big group of newcomers vying to get into the mix. Some of those that could shoot for varsity rounds include Carter Blanco, Meer Patel, Nik Smith, Skylar Jarvis, Garrett Roethler, Nolan Scott, Jaden DeRonde and Maddux Ashman.

The Indians are coming off a conference title which they claimed by a mere four strokes in a meet that saw the top six teams separated by six strokes. Oskaloosa would then go on to take third at sectionals and second at districts to qualify as a team for state.

Four of six that played at state return for the Indians, who ended up taking ninth as a team. The Little Hawkeye Conference should be strong again and there will be some figuring out for the Osky squad to do to see where they will land as the season progresses.

"We play in a pretty strong conference so we will have to be ready to play every meet," Foster said. "I'm looking forward to seeing some competition within the team for those varsity and even JV spots. We can only play six per team and there are 31 guys. There should be some friendly competitiveness that hopefully makes everyone better."

Colin Peters can be reached at 641-672-2581, by email at cpeters@oskyherald.com or on Twitter @ColinPetersOH.

Read more:
Osky golfers looking to replace top two from state team - Yahoo News

A NEW RADIO documentary celebrating the life and work of HPV vaccine campaigner Laura Brennan has been released to mark three years since her death.

Laura was diagnosed with cervical cancer at the age of 24. After her diagnosis, she became involved in the campaign to raise awareness of the HPV vaccine to try to save lives.

Laura Brennan, The Voice tells the story of Lauras life from growing up in Ennis in Co Clare to her work advocating for the HPV vaccine, until her death in 2019.

The documentary features testimonies from those who knew Laura best: her parents Larry and Bernie, her brothers Colin, Fergal and Kevin, and her friends, as well as the President of Royal College of Physicians Mary Horgan and former health minister Simon Harris.

Taoiseach Michel Martin also recorded a tribute to Laura for the documentary, saying that her courageous advocacy in highlighting the fight against cervical cancer, without question, saved the lives of many women.

The documentary was written, produced and directed by Clare FMs Programme Director Padraic Flaherty. Speaking to The Journal, Flaherty said it was an honour to put the tribute together.

Id have known of Larry, her father, whos a very good author. He and Bernie and, when Laura was alive, all had a great relationship with the station. Shes always remained in my thoughts and I said, do you know what, her anniversary will be coming up on Sunday, so I set about doing this late last year, he said.

Thankfully, I gave my idea to Larry and Bernie, and they said yeah, anything that they could do to help out that they will be on hand at the end of the phone, which was a great help, because when youre talking about a young girl that lost her life so tragically, for her family to be able to talk so openly about that, in itself, is a great gift to get.

Flaherty began working on the documentary late last year. When it came to getting interviews for the documentary, he said that those who knew Laura were more than willing to pay tribute to her.

She touched everyone in a way, and family and friends were there straightaway with the hands up, but equally, when I got on to the Taoiseachs office and to Simon Harriss office to say: Look, Im doing this documentary, would the ministers be interested in taking part? And its a great endorsement of what Laura did when they turned around and said: Absolutely, we want to be involved, how can we help?

To get that from the Taoiseach and from the former Minister for Health, its super. Mary Horgan, she was brilliant. She had such affection for Laura. And when I did the interview with Mary, she was still up to her neck in Covid issues and the same for Taoiseach as well. So they both took time out and they were both very, very happy to lend their voice to it, he said.

After learning in September 2017 that her cancer was terminal, Laura began advocating publicly in favour of the HPV vaccine. In the documentary, Horgan outlines Lauras importance to the HPV vaccine campaign.

She was incredibly important. This was at a time when the HPV vaccine uptake dipped quite considerably because of a lot of ill informed people putting misinformation out on social media, she said.

There was a HPV Alliance and that included patient advocates so it resulted in a huge upswing from uptake of vaccine, which was only about 50% to it going right up to approximately 80% of the time, and a huge amount of that was to Laura, her personal story.

Flaherty said it was important for him to highlight the work that Laura did for the vaccine campaign.

With everything going on with Covid for the last few years, getting vaccinated, which was obviously a priority for the country, the HPV vaccination somewhat got lost in conversation. Especially in this county, were always aware of the levels that it went to, which was 90% in Clare and that was all down to Laura, he said.

Despite knowing the family, Flaherty said he learned while making the documentary just how much Lauras death affected them, and how they got through it.

For them to be able to deal with it, and to kind of get an understanding firsthand of what they had to go through for those few days before she passed away and when she passed away. You know, I knew it was heartbreaking, its a heartbreaking, heart wrenching story, but to hear it firsthand from Larry and Bernie and the lads. The strength of that family, certainly, would give any other family strength in the way they pulled together. Theyre a great unit.

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The documentary aired on Clare FM at 11am on 22 March, and Flaherty said the station is absolutely thrilled with the response they have received.

Laura is seen as a hero in this county, and she should always be honoured at that and the texts, the WhatsApps, the emails, the phone calls. They have all been, and its very rare that you say this in media and radio, 100% positive, he said.

Everybody has been talking about it and really accepting the work that Laura did, the wonderful work that she did. Its great for a radio station to be able to put out a documentary thats so warmly received. So were very proud of it.

Flaherty said that he would like anyone who listens to the documentary to keep Laura and the work that she did in their thoughts.

For any of us to do that in our full health should be applauded. But to do that, and to know that the road ahead is going to be very, very difficult, was amazing, he said.

Laura was a fantastic young woman and she went way too early. At 26 years of age, for her to leave this world was tragic, but her work should always be remembered because she saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Her message was heard all over the world, and I think that should always be remembered.

Laura Brennan, The Voice is available to listen to here.

Read the original:
'She saved thousands of lives': Documentary pays tribute to HPV vaccine campaigner Laura Brennan - TheJournal.ie