#ProPublica

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the NYPD defeated bodycams

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When American patience for racial profiling in traffic stops reached a breaking point, cops rolled out dashcams. Dashcam footage went AWOL, or just recorded lots of racist, pretextual stops. Racial profiling continued.

Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to curb the undue use of force by giving cops an alternative to shooting dangerous-seeming people. Instead, we got cops who tasered and sprayed unarmed people and then shot them to pieces.

Next came bodycams: by indelibly recording cops' interactions with the public, body-worn cameras were pitched as a way to bring accountability to American law-enforcement. Finally, police leadership would be able to sort officers' claims from eyewitness accounts and figure out who was lying. Bad cops could be disciplined. Repeat offenders could be fired.

Police boosters insist that police violence and corruption are the result of "a few bad apples." As the saying goes, "a few bad apples spoil the bushel." If you think there are just a few bad cops on the force, then you should want to get rid of them before they wreck the whole institution. Bodycams could empirically identify the bad apples, right?

Well, hypothetically. But what if police leadership don't want to get rid of the bad apples? What if the reason that dashcams, tasers, and pepper spray failed is that police leadership are fine with them? If that were the case, then bodycams would turn into just another expensive prop for an off-Broadway accountability theater.

What if?

In "How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras," Propublica's Eric Umansky and Umar Farooq deliver a characteristically thorough, deep, and fascinating account of the failure of NYPD bodycams to create the accountability that New York's political and police leadership promised:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-police-undermined-promise-body-cameras

Topline: NYPD's bodycam rollout was sabotaged by police leadership and top NYC politicians. Rather than turning over bodycam footage to oversight boards following violent incidents, the NYPD suppresses it. When overseers are allowed to see the footage, they get fragmentary access. When those fragments reveal misconduct, they are forbidden to speak of it. When the revealed misconduct is separate from the main incident, it can't be used to discipline officers. When footage is made available to the public, it is selectively edited to omit evidence of misconduct.

NYPD policy contains loopholes that allow them to withhold footage. Where those loopholes don't apply, the NYPD routinely suppresses footage anyway, violating its own policies. When the NYPD violates its policies, it faces no consequences. When overseers complain, they are fired.

Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that's exactly what will happen. There is nothing about bodycams that makes them more resistant to capture than dashcams, tasers or pepper spray.

This is a problem across multiple police departments. Minneapolis, for example, has policies from before and after the George Floyd uprisings that require bodycam disclosure, and those policies are routinely flouted. Derek Chauvin, George Floyd's murderer, was a repeat offender and had been caught on bodycam kneeling on other Black peoples' necks. Chauvin once clubbed a 14 year old child into unconsciousness and then knelt on his neck for 15 minutes as his mother begged for her child's life. Chauvin faced no discipline for this and the footage was suppressed.

In Montgomery, Alabama, it took five years of hard wrangling to get access to bodycam footage after an officer sicced his attack dog on an unarmed Black man without warning. The dog severed the man's femoral artery and he died. Montgomery PD suppressed the footage, citing the risk of officers facing "embarrassment."

In Memphis, the notoriously racist police department was able to suppress bodycam disclosures until the murder of Tyre Nichols. The behavior of the officers who beat Nichols to death are a testament to their belief in their own impunity. Some officers illegally switched off their cameras; others participated in the beating in full view of the cameras, fearing no consequences.

In South Carolina, the police murder of Walter Scott was captured on a bystander's phone camera. That footage made it clear that Scott's uniformed killers lied, prompting then-governor Nikki Haley to sign a law giving the public access to bodycam footage. But the law contained a glaring loophole: it made bodycam footage "not a public record subject to disclosure." Nothing changed.

Bodycam footage does often reveal that killer cops lie about their actions. When a Cincinnati cop killed a Black man during a 2015 traffic-stop, his bodycam footage revealed that the officer lied about his victim "lunging at him" before he shot. Last summer, a Philadelphia cop was caught lying about the circumstances that led to him murdering a member of the public. Again, the officer claimed the man had "lunged at him." The cop's camera showed the man sitting peacefully in his own car.

Police departments across the country struggle with violent, lying officers, but few can rival the NYPD for corruption, violence, scale and impunity. The NYPD has its own "goon squad," the Strategic Response Group, whose leaked manual reveals how the secret unit spends about $100m/year training and deploying ultraviolent, illegal tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#blam-blam-blam

The NYPD's disciplinary records – published despite a panicked scramble to suppress them – reveal the NYPD's infestation with criminal cops who repeatedly break the law in meting out violence against the public:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#nypd-who

These cops are the proverbial bad apples, and they do indeed spoil the barrel. A 2019 empirical analysis of police disciplinary records show that corruption is contagious: when crooked cops are paired with partners who have clean disciplinary records, those partners become crooked, too, and the effect lasts even after the partnership ends:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023119879798

Despite the risk of harboring criminals in police ranks, the NYPD goes to extreme lengths to keep its worst officers on the street. New York City's police "union"'s deal with the city requires NYC to divert millions to a (once) secret slushfund used to pay high-priced lawyers to defend cops whose conduct is so egregious that the city's own attorneys refuse to defend them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

This is a good place for your periodic reminder that police unions are not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#selective-solidarity

Indeed, despite rhetoric to the contrary, policing is a relatively safe occupation, with death rates well below the risks to roofers, loggers, or pizza delivery drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#onshore-havana-syndrome

The biggest risk to police officers – the single factor that significantly increased death rates among cops – is police unions themselves. Police unions successfully pressured cities across American to reject covid risk mitigation, from masking to vaccinations, leading to a wave of police deaths. "Suicide by cop" is very rare, but US officers committed "mass suicide by cop union":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/police-covid-vaccines.html

But the story that policing is much more dangerous than it really is a useful one. It has a business-model. Military contractors who turn local Barney Fifes into Judge Dredd cosplayers with assault rifles, tanks and other "excess" military gear make billions from the tale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#1033-1022

It's not just beltway bandits who love this story. For cops to be shielded from consequences for murdering the public, they need to tell themselves and the rest of us that they are a "thin blue line," and not mere armed bureaucrats. The myth that cops are in constant danger from the public justifies hair-trigger killings.

Consider the use of "civilian" to describe the public. Police are civilians. The only kind of police officer who isn't a civilian is a military policeman. Places where "civilians" interact with non-civilian law enforcement are, by definition, under military occupation. Calling the public "civilians" is a cheap rhetorical trick that converts a police officer to a patrolling soldier in hostile territory. Calling us "civilians" justifies killing us, because if we're civilians, then they are soldiers and we are at war.

The NYPD clearly conceives of itself as an occupying force and considers its "civilian" oversight to be the enemy. When New York's Civilian Complaint Review Board gained independence in 1993, thousands of off-duty cops joined Rudy Giuliani in a mass protest at City Hall and an occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge. This mass freakout is a measure of police intolerance for oversight – after all, the CCRB isn't even allowed to discipline officers, only make (routinely ignored) recommendations.

Kerry Sweet was the NYPD lawyer who oversaw the department's bodycam rollout. He once joked that the NYPD missed a chance to "bomb the room" where the NYPD's CCRB was meeting (when Propublica asked him to confirm this, he said he couldn't remember those remarks, but "on reflection, it should have been an airstrike").

Obvious defects in the NYPD's bodycam policy go beyond the ability to suppress disclosure of the footage. The department has no official tracking system for its bodycam files. They aren't geotagged, only marked by officer badge-number and name. So if a member of the public comes forward to complain that an unknown officer committed a crime at a specific place and time, there's no way to retrieve that footage. Even where footage can be found, the NYPD often hides the ball: in 20% of cases where the Department told the CCRB footage didn't exist, they were lying.

Figuring out how to make bodycam footage work better is complex, but there are some obvious first steps. Other cities have no problem geotagging their footage. In Chicago, the CCRB can directly access the servers where bodycam footage is stored (when the NYPD CCRB members proposed this, they were fired).

Meanwhile, the NYPD keeps protecting its killers. The Propublica story opens with the police killing of Miguel Richards. Richards' parents hadn't heard from him in a while, so they asked his Bronx landlord to check on him (the Richards live in Jamaica). The landlord called the cops. The cops killed Richards.

The cops claimed he had a gun and they were acting in self-defense. They released a highly edited reel of bodycam footage to support that claim. When the full video was eventually extracted, it revealed that Richards had a tiny plastic toy guy and a small folding knife. The officers involved believed he was suffering an acute mental health incident and stated that policy demanded that they close his bedroom door and wait for specialists. Instead, they barked orders at him and then fired 16 rounds at him. Seven hit him. One ruptured his aorta. As he lay dying on his bedroom floor, one officer roughly tossed him around and cuffed him. He died.

New York's Police Benevolent Association – the largest police "union" in NYC – awarded the officers involved its "Finest of the Finest" prize for their conduct in the killing.

This isn't an isolated incident. A month after the NYPD decided not to punish the cops who killed Richards, NYPD officers murdered Kawaski Trawick in his Bronx apartment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#Kawaski-Trawick

The officers lied about it, suppressed release of the bodycam footage that would reveal their lies, and then escaped any justice when the footage and the lies were revealed.

None of this means that bodycams are useless. It just means that bodycams will only help bring accountability to police forces when they are directed by parties who have the will and power to make the police accountable.

When police leaders and city governments support police corruption, adding bodycams won't change that fact.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Tony Webster, modified https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minneapolis_Police_Officer_Body_Camera_%2848968390892%29.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #impunity #ccrb #nypd #abolish the police #acab #police #corruption #bodycams #body-worn cameras #propublica

[onetwistedmiracle]

Americans and friends of Americans: please reblog this, here and elsewhere. Reblog it often. Propublica can be trusted and it should not cost money to file our fucking taxes.

#for my american friends #taxes #propublica #file for free #file taxes for free #how to file free #how to file taxes for free #free tax filing

[mirkobloom77]

‼️🇵🇸🇮🇱🇺🇸 ProPublica report shows ‘unprecedented’ rift within US administration

🔸 Source: Al Jazeera

#palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #israel #palestine news #jerusalem #tel aviv #propublica

[uboat53]

You know, it's become fairly obvious that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is playing fast and loose with ethics, waltzing right past the line on many occasions, but it's also obvious that he fails to recognize what part of it hurts him the most.

The things he did are bad, yes, but what really makes him look bad is the fact that we're still not hearing about any of it from him.

Think about it, the revelations of the expensive vacations and private travel that Harlan Crow provided to him came four and a half months ago. If he'd come clean then and publicly disclosed everything that he had done, he might have at least salvaged some shred of trust, but he didn't. Instead, he continued to obfuscate and claim that, as a Supreme Court Justice charged with carefully analyzing some of the most complex legal issues in the land, he wasn't capable of fully understanding a basic ethics and disclosure requirement.

Now we find out that he's been helping right-wing legal groups raise money, right wing legal groups that routinely come before him in his capacity as a Supreme Court Justice. And we didn't hear it from him, we heard it from investigative reporting. Again.

The real question now isn't about all of the extremely unethical things Thomas has done, though there are certainly enough of them at this point that a reasonable person would begin to consider impeachment a possibility. No, the real question now is how many more of these ethical lapses Justice Thomas is hiding, when the dogged reporting of ProPublica will uncover them, and whether the Supreme Court can maintain any sort of reputation for fairness by the time it is all over.

#charles koch #politics #us politics #clarence thomas #harlan crow #us supreme court #supreme court #scotus #propublica

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Steve Benen

By any fair measure, Justice Clarence Thomas was already one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most controversial members, even before this year got underway. But in recent months, the far-right jurist has faced a series of ethics questions that he and his allies have struggled to answer.

Over the last three months, ProPublica has taken the lead on exposing Thomas’ unusual and previously undisclosed ties to a Republican megadonor. Over the weekend, The New York Times took the story considerably further.

At the heart of the story is an organization with a name that’s probably unfamiliar to most Americans, but which counts among its members an exclusive group of powerful and wealthy elites:

“On Oct. 15, 1991, Clarence Thomas secured his seat on the Supreme Court, a narrow victory after a bruising confirmation fight that left him isolated and disillusioned. Within months, the new Justice enjoyed a far-warmer acceptance to a second exclusive club: the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, named for the Gilded Age author whose rags-to-riches novels represented an aspirational version of Justice Thomas’s own bootstraps origin story.”

According to the Times’ account, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, it was quite a pairing, as the Supreme Court Justice found a home alongside “a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionized him.”

The non-profit organization, which awards scholarships and promotes members’ “economic opportunity” ideals, has benefited from the association with Thomas. From the article:

“While he has never held an official leadership position, in some ways he has become the association’s leading light. He has granted it unusual access to the Supreme Court, where every year he presides over the group’s signature event: a ceremony in the courtroom at which he places Horatio Alger medals around the necks of new lifetime members. One entrepreneur called it “the closest thing to being knighted in the United States.””

Just so we’re clear, when the Times mentioned “the courtroom,” it was referring specifically to the Supreme Court’s interior chamber where Justices sit and hear oral arguments.

“The association has used access to the court ceremony and related events in the annual gathering to raise money for scholarships and other programming, according to fund-raising records reviewed by The Times,” the report added.

As for Thomas, he’s received benefits of his own, beyond simply enjoying the camaraderie of like-minded allies who were eager to celebrate him. The Times’ account highlighted the degree to which the Justices’ associations with the association’s members “brought him proximity to a lifestyle of unimaginable material privilege.”

The result was relationships in which Thomas’ Horatio Alger friends “have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties.”

Remember, over the last few months, the Supreme Court Justices’ principal problem was his relationship with Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, and the generosity the GOP megadonor has shown Thomas. But what the Times appears to have uncovered is a similar problem multiplied several times: Thomas “has received benefits — many of them previously unreported — from a broader cohort of wealthy and powerful friends,” thanks to his connections established through the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.

Among the benefits: In 2016, an HBO film brought Anita Hill’s allegations against Thomas back to the fore. Soon after, a documentary titled “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” designed to defend the Justice, was released.

It was financed in part by Thomas’ Horatio Alger pals.

The Justice has not yet responded to the allegations raised by the Times.

#us politics #news #msnbc #steve benen #maddowblog #2023 #op eds #justice clarence thomas #us supreme court #ethics rules #ethics violations #the new york times #propublica #Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans #Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words #corruption #scotus

[kp777]

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

April 6, 2023

One observer urged congressional Democrats to "put Republicans on the record supporting this level of corruption, and make the corrupt judiciary a campaign issue."

Progressives on Thursday urged congressional Democrats to immediately push for investigations and impeachment proceedings after bombshell reporting by ProPublica revealed that right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been taking luxury trips funded by a billionaire Republican megadonor for more than 20 years without formally disclosing them—a likely violation of federal law.

The investigative outlet reported Thursday that "for more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year" from Dallas-based real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

According to ProPublica, Thomas "has vacationed on Crow's superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow's Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow's sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks."

"These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas' financial disclosures," the outlet noted. "His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress, and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said."

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who is now with the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told ProPublica that the justice "seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations."

"When a justice's lifestyle is being subsidized by the rich and famous, it absolutely corrodes public trust," said Canter. "Quite frankly, it makes my heart sink."

The luxury trip revelation is just the latest scandal for Thomas, who has faced mounting scrutiny over the past year for alleged ethics violations, including his decision not to recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 presidential election despite his wife's direct involvement in efforts to overturn the results of that contest.

"Democrats should force an impeachment vote of Justice Thomas on the House floor," Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch argued Thursday in response to the ProPublica reporting. "It won't pass, obviously, but put Republicans on the record supporting this level of corruption, and make the corrupt judiciary a campaign issue."

It's unclear how House Democrats would go about forcing an impeachment vote given GOP control of the chamber. Republicans have repeatedly defended Thomas as he's faced backlash over his failure to recuse from election-related cases.

Brian Fallon, executive director of the advocacy group Demand Justice, said in a statement Thursday that the Senate—which is narrowly controlled by Democrats—"cannot let this extraordinary display of corruption and lawbreaking go unanswered."

"Senate Democrats cannot force Thomas to resign or give him the impeachment trial he clearly deserves, but they can hold hearings to further expose Justice Thomas’ apparent lawbreaking and the Republican justices' deep ties to far-right donors," said Fallon. "As long as we are stuck with a Supreme Court made up of corrupt idealogues in the pocket of far-right donors, the American people deserve to know the truth."

ProPublica stressed that "the extent and frequency of Crow's apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court."

"Crow's access to the justice extends to anyone the businessman chooses to invite along," the outlet reported. "Thomas' frequent vacations at Topridge have brought him into contact with corporate executives and political activists. During just one trip in July 2017, Thomas' fellow guests included executives at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major Republican donors, and one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank."

The outlet noted that a painting of Thomas at Topridge—Crow's private lakeside resort in upstate New York—shows Thomas "in conversation with Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee and a vocal advocate of ethics reform on the high court, wrote on Twitter that ProPublica's reporting "cries out for the kind of independent investigation that the Supreme Court—and only the Supreme Court, across the entire government—refuses to perform."

"It's not just the undisclosed gifts of hospitality, it's the undisclosed company of political operatives—particularly Leonard Leo, the operative who helped the billionaires capture the court," Whitehouse continued. "Who were Thomas' companions on these free undisclosed vacations, and what interests did those undisclosed companions have before the court? The question is obvious."

"All of this needs robust investigation," the senator added, "and it's the chief justice's job to make sure that occurs."

#clarence thomas #u.s. supreme court #judicial ethics #impeachment #u.s. congress #call to action #propublica #common dreams

[pennsyltuckyheathen]

(via Biden Administration to Overhaul Welfare Following ProPublica Reporting — ProPublica)

Photo:  Welfare Square, the center of the Mormon Church’s program of aid to the needy. Under a new Biden administration proposal, Utah would no longer be allowed to take credit for the church’s charitable giving. Credit:Kim Raff for ProPublica  

MAGA Republicans committing welfare fraud by misusing federal funds and ignoring the regulations and their intent.  

#MAGACorruption #MAGARepublicans #WelfareFraud #ProPublica

[s-leary]

Treat every customer like they’re your 85-year-old grandma who’s never done a real estate deal, HomeVestors trainers tell franchise owners at annual conferences. But a ProPublica investigation — based on court documents, property records, company training materials and interviews with 48 former franchise owners and dozens of homeowners who have sold to its franchises — found HomeVestors franchisees that used deception and targeted the elderly, infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling. One HomeVestors franchisee falsely claimed to a 72-year-old woman suffering from a hoarding problem that city code enforcement officers would take her house, according to court documents. An Arizona woman said in an interview that she was forced to live in her truck after trying unsuccessfully to cancel the sale of her home. One court case documented the plight of an elderly man in Florida who was told if he sold his condo he could continue living there temporarily. But he spent his final days alive waiting to be evicted when — after the contract was signed — the franchise owner informed him the homeowners association rules didn’t allow it. “You were always lying to them. That’s what we were trained,” said Katie Southard, who owned a franchise in North Carolina.

The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses” — ProPublica

#homevestors #real estate #capitalism #housing #propublica

[gautierprotectionsquad]

"⁠The move comes as museums across the country consult with tribes and evaluate their compliance with new federal regulations intended to speed up the process of returning ancestral remains and sacred items under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. "

“While the actions we are taking this week may seem sudden, they reflect a growing urgency among all museums to change their relationships to, and representation of, Indigenous cultures,” Decatur wrote to staff. “The Halls we are closing are vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives, and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples.”

#romanticsap #good news #american museum of natural history #articles #propublica

[mostlysignssomeportents]

'We buy ugly houses' is code for 'we steal vulnerable peoples' homes'

Tonight (May 11) at 7PM, I’m in CALGARY for Wordfest, with my novel Red Team Blues; I’ll be hosted by Peter Hemminger at the Memorial Park Library, 2nd Floor.

Home ownership is the American dream: not only do you get a place to live, free from the high-handed dictates of a landlord, but you also get an asset that appreciates, building intergenerational wealth while you sleep — literally.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

Of course, you can’t have it both ways. If your house is an asset you use to cover falling wages, rising health care costs, spiraling college tuition and paper-thin support for eldercare, then it can’t be a place you live. It’s gonna be an asset you sell — or at the very least, borrow so heavily against that you are in constant risk of losing it.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: when America turned its back on organized labor as an engine for creating prosperity and embraced property speculation, it set itself on the road to serfdom — a world where the roof over your head is also your piggy bank, destined to be smashed open to cover the rising costs that an organized labor movement would have fought:

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

Today, we’re hit the end of the road for the post-war (unevenly, racially segregated) shared prosperity that made it seem, briefly, that everyone could get rich by owning a house, living in it, then selling it to everybody else. Now that the game is ending, the winners are cashing in their chips:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9

The big con of home ownership is proceeding smartly on schedulee. First, you let the mark win a little, so they go all in on the scam. Then you take it all back. Obama’s tolerance of bank sleze after the Great Financial Crisis kicked off the modern era of corporations and grifters stealing Americans’ out from under them, forging deeds in robosigning mills:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-breaks-down-93-bln-robo-signing-settlement-2013-02-28

The thefts never stopped. Today on Propublica, by Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon bring a horrifying, brilliantly reported account of the rampant, bottomless scams of Homevestors, AKA We Buy Ugly Houses, AKA “the #1 homebuyer in the USA”:

https://www.propublica.org/article/ugly-truth-behind-we-buy-ugly-houses

Homevestors — an army of the hedge fund Bayview Asset Management — claims a public mission: to bail out homeowners sitting on unsellable houses with all-cash deals. The company’s franchisees — 1,150 of them in 48 states — then sprinkle pixie dust and secret sauce on these “ugly houses” and sell them at a profit.

But Propublica’s investigation — which relied on whistleblowers, company veterans, court records and interviews with victims — tells a very different story. The Homevestor they discovered is a predator that steals houses out from under elderly people, disabled people, people struggling with mental illness and other vulnerable people. It’s a company whose agents have a powerful, well-polished playbook that stops family members from halting the transfers the company’s high-pressure salespeople set in motion.

Propublica reveals homeowners with advanced dementia who signed their shaky signatures to transfers that same their homes sold out from under them for a fraction of their market value. They show how Homevestor targets neighborhoods struck by hurricanes, or whose owners are recently divorced, or sick. One whistleblower tells of how the company uses the surveillance advertising industry to locate elderly people who’ve broken a hip: “a 60-day countdown to death — and, possibly, a deal.” The company’s mobile ads are geofenced to target people near hospitals and rehab hospitals, in hopes of finding desperate sellers who need to liquidate homes so that Medicaid will cover their medical expenses.

The sales pitches are relentless. One of Homevestor’s targets was a Texas woman whose father had recently been murdered. As she grieved, they blanketed her in pitches to sell her father’s house until “checking her mail became a traumatic experience.”

Real-estate brokers are bound by strict regulations, but not house flippers like Homevestors. Likewise, salespeople who pitch other high-ticket items, from securities to plane tickets — are required to offer buyers a cooling-off period during which they can reconsider their purchases. By contrast, Homevestors’ franchisees are well-versed in “muddying the title” to houses after the contract is signed, filing paperwork that makes it all but impossible for sellers to withdraw from the sale.

This produces a litany of ghastly horror-stories: homeowners who end up living in their trucks after they were pressured into a lowball sales; sellers who end up dying in hospital beds haunted by the trick that cost them their homes. One woman who struggled with hoarding was tricked into selling her house by false claims that the city would evict her because of her hoarding. A widow was tricked into signing away the deed to her late husband’s house by the lie that she could do so despite not being on the deed. One seller was tricked into signing a document he believed to be a home equity loan application, only to discover he had sold his house at a huge discount on its market value. An Arizona woman was tricked into selling her dead mother’s house through the lie that the house would have to be torn down and the lot redeveloped; the Homevestor franchisee then flipped the house for 5,500% of the sale-price.

The company vigorously denies these claims. They say that most people who do business with Homevestors are happy with the outcome; in support of this claim, they cite internal surveys of their own customers that produce a 96% approval rating.

When confronted with the specifics, the company blamed rogue franchisees. But Propublica obtained training materials and other internal documents that show that the problem is widespread and endemic to Homevestors’ business. Propublica discovered that at least eight franchisees who engaged in conduct the company said it “didn’t tolerate” had been awarded prizes by the company for their business acumen.

Franchisees are on the hook for massive recurring fees and face constant pressure from corporate auditors to close sales. To make those sales, franchisees turn to Homevana’s training materials, which are rife with predatory tactics. One document counsels franchisees that “pain is always a form of motivation.” What kind of pain? Lost jobs, looming foreclosure or a child in need of surgery.

A former franchisee explained how this is put into practice in the field: he encountered a seller who needed to sell quickly so he could join his dying mother who had just entered a hospice 1,400 miles away. The seller didn’t want to sell the house; they wanted to “get to Colorado to see their dying mother.”

These same training materials warn franchisees that they must not deal with sellers who are “subject to a guardianship or has a mental capacity that is diminished to the point that the person does not understand the value of the property,” but Propublica’s investigation discovered “a pattern of disregard” for this rule. For example, there was the 2020 incident in which a 78-year-old Atlanta man sold his house to a Homevestors franchisee for half its sale price. The seller was later shown to be “unable to write a sentence or name the year, season, date or month.”

The company tried to pin the blame for all this on bad eggs among its franchisees. But Propublica found that some of the company’s most egregious offenders were celebrated and tolerated before and after they were convicted of felonies related to their conduct on behalf of the company. For example, Hi-Land Properties is a five-time winner of Homevestors’ National Franchise of the Year prize. The owner was praised by the CEO as “loyal, hardworking franchisee who has well represented our national brand, best practices and values.”

This same franchisee had “filed two dozen breach of contract lawsuits since 2016 and clouded titles on more than 300 properties by recording notices of a sales contract.” Hi-Land “sued an elderly man so incapacitated by illness he couldn’t leave his house.”

Another franchisee, Patriot Holdings, uses the courts aggressively to stop families of vulnerable people from canceling deals their relatives signed. Patriot Holdings’ co-owner, Cory Evans, eventually pleaded guilty to to two felonies, attempted grand theft of real property. He had to drop his lawsuits against buyers, and make restitution.

According to Homevestors’ internal policies, Patriot’s franchise should have been canceled. But Homevestors allowed Patriot to stay in business after Cory Evans took his name off the business, leaving his brothers and other partners to run it. Nominally, Cory Evans was out of the picture, but well after that date, internal Homevestors included Evans in an award it gave to Patriot, commemorating its sales (Homevestors claims this was an error).

Propublica’s reporters sought comment from Homevestors and its franchisees about this story. The company hired “a former FBI spokesperson who specializes in ‘crisis and special situations’ and ‘reputation management’ and funnelled future questions through him.”

Internally, company leadership scrambled to control the news. The company convened a webinar in April with all 1,150 franchisees to lay out its strategy. Company CEO David Hicks explained the company’s plan to “bury” the Propublica article with “‘strategic ad buys on social and web pages’ and ‘SEO content to minimize visibility.’”

https://www.propublica.org/article/homevestors-aims-to-bury-propublica-reporting

Franchisees were warned not to click links to the story because they “might improve its internet search ranking.”

Even as the company sought to “bury” the story and stonewalled Propublica, they cleaned house, instituting new procedures and taking action against franchisees identified in Propublica’s article. “Clouding titles” is now prohibited. Suing sellers for breach of contract is “discouraged.” Deals with seniors “should always involve family, attorneys or other guardians.”

During the webinar, franchisees “pushed back on the changes, claiming they could hurt business.”

If you’ve had experience with hard-sell house-flippers, Propublica wants to know: “If you’ve had experience with a company or buyer promising fast cash for homes, our reporting team wants to hear about it.”

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A Depression-era photo of a dour widow standing in front of a dilapidated cabin. Next to her is Ug, the caveman mascot for Homevestors, smiling and pointing at her. Behind her is a 'We buy ugly houses' sign.

Image: Homevestors https://www.homevestors.com/

Fair use: https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property

#pluralistic #the rents too damned high #house flipping #llc brain #scams #elder abuse #ripoffs #weaponized shelter #predators #homevestors #we buy ugly houses #ugly houses #real estate #propublica

[whitesinhistory]

Months Ago State Dept. Panel Exposed Israeli Units’ Rights Abuses, But U.S. Arms Keep Flowing

A State Department panel urged the Biden administration in December to disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid over serious human rights abuses, including rape and torture. According to ProPublica, Secretary of State Blinken received the recommendation in December but has still not taken any action. Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Netanyahu and his chief rival who is widely expected to succeed him in office, Benny Gantz, have been "publicly and fiercely lobbying against any proposed sanctions," says ProPublica reporter Brett Murphy. "Gantz said he called Blinken personally and they talked about it. They want him to reverse course."

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday.

Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.

#jumblr #israel #Palestine #am yisrael chai #history #white history #Brett Murphy #benjamin netanyahu #Netanyahu #Antony Blinken #propublica #democracy now #Netzah Yehuda Battalion #Netzah Yehuda #West Bank #1999 #Youtube #Benny Gantz

[infamousbrad]

I don't often get C-PTSD flashbacks from reading ProPublica news articles. I'm going to have to spend some time breathing deliberately and/or take a sleeping pill and go back to bed.

I'm autistic. Job hunting was hell for me at the best of times because I've never met a Human Resources employee who wasn't bigoted against the mentally ill. "You're perfectly qualified for the job, but I just don't think you'd be a good fit." So every job hunt I've ever had, even in boom times, has taken me a year or more to find someone who knew me, personally or professionally from a previous job, who had an opening and could pull rank on H.R. to get me in. And every job ended the same way: I got transferred to a disability-hostile manager ("it's not fair to everyone else if I treat you differently") and almost immediately fired. So threatening to fire me is only one step down from threatening to try to kill me.

And I've been threatened with being fired way more times than I've actually been fired. I'm a naturally scrupulous person, especially when safety issues are involved because I can't not worry, but also I know I'm really bad at telling when the people around me think the rules matter and when they don't (and worse at caring about their feelings about it being okay to break the rules this time). And I have long-since lost track of how many times I've been confronted with the choice:

Either commit a crime that puts people in danger ...

Or else we'll fire you, and you'll have to explain to every human resources department you apply at that you were fired for disobeying an order.

God, I hate this species. "I don't care if it's unsafe or illegal, I need it done." "Everybody cheats, if you don't cheat you can't make money." "We've gotten away with it before, it'll be fine." And "if other people die, they die; it's more important to get the job done." Fuck fuck fuck, I hate it. 'Cause it's real cheap of them to say when they're not going to be the one who gets hurt, isn't it? It's not like their families are going to get killed when (not if) a train derails, so who cares?

Some outlet I read (I think it was the WaPo?) did a long series about whistleblowing a little while back and concluded that most of us won't even say we want more whistleblowers, and most of the people who say they do don't mean it, certainly not when it comes to their own misdeeds. In one of the articles in the series, they cited moral foundations theory and suggested that that's because almost half of us rank "loyalty" above most or all other virtues. As in yes honesty and safety are virtues, but loyalty to your employer, your team, whatever is a more important virtue.

Fuck that. If I've let myself get peer pressured or tricked or bullied into doing something (or worse, ordering something) illegal and unsafe, I want subordinates who'll call me on my bullshit, hold me accountable. I need backup, everybody needs backup! Retaliate against whistleblowers? Fuck that noise; if I were in a position to hire, I'd offer extra to hire people who'd blown the whistle on misconduct to the point where they got fired for it -- I may not be able to trust them to "have my back" (which I don't even want when I'm in the wrong!) but I can trust them to tell the truth and protect others.

Obviously this means I've never worked in H.R. And it probably overlaps heavily with why my last real, professional employer finally told me I'd never make management. And shortly thereafter fired me. In a straight-up case of whistleblower retaliation. And then went so far as to lie to every potential employer I applied to that I was fired for "making terroristic threats," a straight-up frame-up that guaranteed that I'd never work in my industry again.

#rail safety #workplace safety #whistleblower retaliation #propublica

[infinitemonkeytheory]

As Rail Profits Soar, Blocked Crossings Force Kids to Crawl Under Trains to Get to School

When trains block a crossing for hours on end, kids risk their lives to get to school.

The stopped trains also prevent ambulances and fire trucks from helping people in an emergency.

The problem of blocked crossings has existed for decades.

But it’s getting worse.

#rail safety #corporate greed #late stage capitalism #propublica

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted secret luxury trips from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow for more than two decades in apparent violation of a financial disclosure law, a ProPublica report revealed Thursday.

Thomas has vacationed on Crow's 162-foot superyacht, flown on the real estate developer's private jet and spent time at the GOP donor's private resort and other exclusive retreats, ProPublica reported, citing documents and dozens of interviews.

Thomas, the 74-year-old conservative associate justice who has served on the nation's highest court since 1991, has not reported the trips on his financial disclosures as required by law, the nonprofit newsroom reported.

The investigation offers more fuel for Thomas' critics, who say his refusal to recuse himself from cases touching on issues related to his wife's political work in conservative circles — including her involvement in schemes to overturn the 2020 election — poses a conflict of interest.

Ethics experts and ex-judges interviewed by ProPublica were incredulous. Thomas "seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations," Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at the watchdog group CREW, told the outlet.

"When a justice's lifestyle is being subsidized by the rich and famous, it absolutely corrodes public trust," Canter said.

Spokespeople for the Supreme Court and Crow did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on the investigation.

In a statement to ProPublica, Crow said, "The hospitality we have extended to the Thomas's over the years is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends."

Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, "never asked" for any of the gifts, nor for any of the contributions the Crows have made to projects celebrating the Justice's "life and legacy," the megadonor said. Crow added that he and his wife "have never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue."

Crow, a Texas real estate magnate, became friends with Thomas after he joined the Supreme Court. He has given more than $10 million in publicly disclosed political donations, and unknown amounts to groups that aren't required to reveal their donors, ProPublica reported.

Thomas typically spends about a week each summer at Topridge, Crow's private lakeside resort in the Adirondacks, and flight records show he has used Crow's plane numerous times, according to the news outlet.

In 2019, shortly after the court shared its final opinion of the term, Clarence and Ginni Thomas took off on Crow's private jet for a nine-day vacation in Indonesia aboard the donor's yacht — a trip that cost more than $500,000, according to ProPublica.

The report also cited records showing that Thomas had been at Topridge at the same time as major GOP donors, corporate executives and a leader of the conservative American Enterprise Institute during a July 2017 trip.

A painting hanging inside the lakeside resort shows Thomas and Crow smoking cigars and chatting with conservative figures, the report said. They include Leonard Leo, the influential Federalist Society leader credited with helping former President Donald Trump pick his judicial nominations and shift federal courts to the right.

Crow contended in his statement that he was "unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case."

Supreme Court Justices are constrained by fewer ethical restrictions than lower rungs of the judiciary. Some groups have called to implement a code of ethics for the high court.

But Justices still submit financial disclosures, and experts say they are required to disclose all gifts valued at more than $415. While there are exceptions to that requirement, transportation is not one of them.

"If Justice Thomas received free travel on private planes and yachts, failure to report the gifts is a violation of the disclosure law," Kedric Payne, senior ethics director for the Campaign Legal Center, told the outlet.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., later Thursday morning called for an "enforceable code of conduct" for Supreme Court Justices as he slammed Thomas over the reported secret trips.

"The highest court in the land shouldn't have the lowest ethical standards," Durbin said in response to the report. "This behavior is simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a Justice on the Supreme Court."

Read the full report from ProPublica.

#us politics #news #propublica #cnbc #us supreme court #scouts #ethics rules #justice clarence thomas #ginni thomas #Harlan Crow #republicans #conservatives #gop #corporate lobbyists #lobbyists #citizens for responsibility and ethics in washington #Virginia Canter #topridge #adirondack mountains #new york #Indonesia #American Enterprise Institute #Leonard Leo #federalist society #Kedric Payne #Campaign Legal Center #sen. dick durbin #2023

[kp777]

#u.s. supreme court #democracy #joe biden #propublica #john harwood

[anastasiaoftheironwood]

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#ProPublica #US healthcare mess #insurance claims