United States News, November 2019 Supplement.
The Associated Press and PBS Frontline reported that new government data show “an unprecedented 69,550 migrant children held in U.S. government custody over the past [fiscal] year,” up 42% from fiscal year 2018. About 4,000 were still in custody as of November. By comparison, Canada detained 155 immigrant children in 2018 and the U.K. 42. https://apnews.com/015702afdb4d4fbf85cf5070cd2c6824 69,000
Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which “has been regularly requesting snapshots of anonymized data” from the database maintained by the Executive Office for Immigration Review [EOIR], the agency that oversees the U.S. immigration court system, said it “discovered that some months ago the EOIR had begun silently deleting swaths of records in their entirety from the data releases that we and other members of the public received.” TRAC identified both intentional and unintentional data removal, “garbled data releases,” and “possible data deletion in master database.” It worried that “because EOIR’s data are relied upon as part of the official record of court filings and proceedings that have taken place, one should not expect official records to simply go missing without explanation.” https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/2019/11/09/new-york-university-trac-missing-immigration-court-records/2506759001/; https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/580/
A study by Everytown Research, using data “from 30 million discharge records from 950 hospitals and emergency rooms over 3 years,” found that an “average of 100 people a day are killed from gun violence” and another “two people hit by gun violence are left injured, maimed, or incapacitated,” VICE News reported. One in six gun injuries involve children or teens, and 20-to-24-year-olds are the age group “most susceptible to gun violence.” https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke7ga/exclusive-america-is-vastly-undercounting-the-number-of-people-being-injured-by-guns-report-finds; for the data https://everytownresearch.org/everystat?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=806ad5ba2b-MR_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-806ad5ba2b-149736437
Funded by the Department of Justice, the Violence Project, a “nonpartisan think tank,” published a study on mass shooters. The Project created a dataset on mass murders from 1 August 1966 to the present, using the FBI definition of mass murder as one in which 4 or more people were killed, excluding the perpetrator. It showed that nearly all mass shooters had 4 things in common: an experience with childhood trauma, a personal crisis or specific grievance, a “script” or examples that validate their feelings, and access to a firearm. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a35mya/nearly-all-mass-shooters-since-1966-have-had-four-things-in-common
New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the gap between rural and urban Americans who die from preventable causes has widened across many conditions between 2010-2017. For example, nearly 29% of rural deaths from cancer were preventable in 2010; that dropped to about 22% in 2017, but in urban areas it dropped from around 18% to roughly 3%. figure. Oddly, the gap between rural and urban areas for “unintentional injuries” narrowed; 61% of such rural deaths in 2010 increased to 64% in 2017, but 25% of such deaths in cities in 2010 nearly doubled to 48%.
Ciitizen, a California company, “requests medical records on behalf of cancer patients and redacts them for clarity and legibility,” Kaiser Health News reported. It released a “report card” on how well health care providers comply with Federal rules that require them to make copies of medical records available within 30 days of the request. Of the 210 providers from which it has requested information, 51% were noncompliant or required “significant intervention” by Ciitizen to comply. The company also conducted a telephone survey of nearly 3,000 health care institutions and reported that more than half were out of compliance. https://khn.org/news/startup-seeks-to-hold-doctors-hospitals-accountable-on-patient-record-requests/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=5584967b37-MR_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-5584967b37-149736437
Funded by the Department of Justice, the Violence Project, a “nonpartisan think tank,” published a study of mass shooters. The Project created a dataset of all mass murders from 1 August 1966 to the present, using the FBI definition of mass murder as one in which 4 or more people were killed, excluding the perpetrator. It showed that nearly all mass shooters had 4 things in common: an experience with childhood trauma, a personal crisis or specific grievance, a “script” or examples that validate their feelings, and access to a firearm. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a35mya/nearly-all-mass-shooters-since-1966-have-had-four-things-in-common
The Guardian reported that a whistleblower who works in “Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the U.S. to Google,” posted a video disclosing documents laying out the stages of the project, about which “no warning” has been given to either patients or doctors. Following the posting, both Google and Ascension, the healthcare provider, released statements saying the transfer will be compliant with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/12/google-medical-data-project-nightingale-secret-transfer-us-health-information; see also report on Google and health data at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/google-project-nightingale-all-your-health-data/601999/?silverid-ref=NTI0NDYyODAzNDgwS0&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20191121&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter
Amazon’s subsidiary Ring, which makes home surveillance equipment and cameras, has “partnerships” with “more than 600 law enforcement agencies nationwide, allows those police access to users’ footage,” Ars Technica reported. “And while Ring says it sets terms around how and when it will share that footage with police, anything the police do with it afterward is entirely out of its hands, the company says.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/cops-can-keep-ring-footage-forever-share-it-with-anyone-amazon-confirms/
A California Federal court said the FBI “can’t refuse to confirm or deny the existence of records pertaining to its social media monitoring program,” Bloomberg Law reported.
MotherJones and Type Investigations produced a long report on the detention of people by the U.S. Marshals Service, an arm of the Department of Justice. The Marshals hold people facing Federal criminal charges; in fiscal year 2018 “the Marshals held nearly 240,000 people” in “about” 1,100 local jails and private prisons. With charges of immigration crimes high, the Marshals have had a “frantic pursuit of beds,” which helps “prop up failing jails,” according to as review of seven years of inspection records (gained through a lawsuit) of “dozens of facilities” and interviews. At the Jack Harwell Detention Center, a privately run county jail in Texas, interview with former employees said “it was regular practice to ‘pencil whip’ the logs” and “supervisors were more concerned with making documents look right than enforcing proper rounds.” https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/10/inside-the-us-marshals-secretive-deadly-detention-empire/
Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against two staff members of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City where Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in August; the indictment charges that they “repeatedly signed false certifications” that they conducted regular checks on him, a charge based on video from the Center’s “internal video surveillance system.” https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1218466/download
The Associated Press and PBS Frontline reported that new government data show “an unprecedented 69,550 migrant children held in U.S. government custody over the past [fiscal] year,” which is up 42% from fiscal year 2018. About 4,000 were still in custody as of November. By comparison, Canada detained 155 immigrant children in 2018 and the U.K. 42. https://apnews.com/015702afdb4d4fbf85cf5070cd2c6824 69,000
The FBI’s annual report said hate crimes reached a 16-year high in 2018, and that “assaults targeting Muslims, Arab Americans and African Americans have gone down, while violence against Latinos has risen,” axios reported.https://www.axios.com/hate-crimes-fbi-report-high-violent-property-6f9b013a-e448-4bd5-a18d-4b4643710362.html
The Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) issued a report saying that the Veterans Benefits Administration (a part of the VA) in May 2016 stopped redacting personal information on other people when responding to a request by a veteran for his or her file. That practice, the IG said, “put millions of people at risk of identity theft.” https://www.va.gov/oig/pubs/VAOIG-19-05960-244.pdf
A 2008 law requires drug companies and academic research centers to report clinical trial results with a year of the trial’s completion so they can be posted on ClinicalTrials.gov. STAT reported that research published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that of 135 known completed trials that should have been reported in 2018 only 68 were posted. STAT found that even results from academic institutions that were received arrived later than the one year limit 90% of the time. Furthermore, the former director of the government website said the data that was submitted was inadequate: “We talk about these very poor-quality records being a disturbing reflection of a clinical research enterprise that has trouble producing results from clinical trials on human beings, when the whole point of doing the trial is to produce those results.”
In the personal papers of Louis Jolyon West at the University of California Los Angeles archives, researchers found correspondence between the professor, who headed the psychiatry department, and the Central Intelligence Agency relating to MKUltra, the Agency’s infamous “program of research in behavioral modification” which lasted from about 1953 to 1973. They wrote in The Intercept that this body of evidence is significant because CIA director Richard Helms “ordered” the head of the chemical division of the Agency’s Technical Services Staff “to destroy all MKUltra papers; in January 1973 the Technical Services Staff shredded countless documents describing the use of hallucinogens.” https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/
United States/Louisiana. BuzzFeed News obtained an 84-page report by the New Orleans Inspector General showing that the city’s Sewerage and Water Board knew that “incomplete and unreliable information on the locations of lead service lines left it unable to alert citizens who might be at risk of exposure to lead in tap water.” Lead is particularly dangerous to fetuses, babies and young children. In 2016 11% of the children under 6 years of age in New Orleans tested for blood lead concentrations at or above 5 micrograms per deciliter; the national figure is 2.5% and the CD Control “maintains that no level of blood lead is safe for children.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhisubbaraman/new-orleans-lead-water-hidden-report?utm_source=STAT%2BNewsletters&utm_campaign=d26ed194d2-MR_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-d26ed194d2-149736437
United States/New York. The Intercept reported that the New York City Police Department retained a “database containing the fingerprints of thousands of children charged as juvenile delinquents—in direct violation of state law mandating that police destroy these records after turning [the children] over to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services.” https://theintercept.com/2019/11/13/nypd-juvenile-illegal-fingerprint-database/
The New York City archives made public 140 hours of police surveillance film between 1960 and 1980. The film was taken by the police’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations to gather “information on individuals and groups across the political spectrum, but particularly civil rights, anti-war and feminist activists,” New York Daily News reported. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-archives-surveillance-nypd-20191125-j4rwgpd4uvfqnoegnj4hnnhn6u-story.html