‘The protests were whiter than the police department’: Peter Moskos – sociologist and former Baltimore cop – talks to spiked about race, policing and mass incarceration

By Tom Slater, Deputy Editor.

"‘If the goal is to save black lives, it’s not working. If the goal is to get rid of police, it’s working’, says Peter Moskos, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and a former Baltimore cop. 

In the wake of the brutal police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests have erupted nationwide, and politicians have responded by cutting and disempowering police. 

Meanwhile, crime has spiralled in precisely the communities the Black Lives Matter movement hopes to defend. ‘We’re dismantling the NYPD now, and violence has gone up 200 per cent’, he says.

In the increasingly polarised debate around policing in America, Moskos offers a unique perspective. He calls himself a pro-cop liberal – ‘it’s a very small Venn diagram’, he jokes. 

A Harvard-trained sociologist, Moskos spent 14 months working as a policeman in the ghettos of Baltimore’s Eastern District. He published a book about it in 2008, Cop in the Hood.

He has chronicled countless police killings, but that didn’t make the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes any less disturbing for him. 

‘It’s a different league’, Moskos says. ‘I have seen a lot of these and usually I’m like, well, is there a way I can see it from the cop’s perspective? But this one was just… I don’t get it. And no one really gets it… He killed the guy.’

The universal condemnation of that sadistic killing and the swift action taken against Chauvin were a rare example, he goes on, of the system actually working.

‘Everyone has condemned the killing, including police unions. I’ve never seen that before’, he says. ‘The guy was charged and arrested. That is our system of justice.’

But the protests nevertheless spread like wildfire, burnishing a long-running narrative about racist cops and resurrecting the Black Lives Matter movement.

This has prompted drastic political responses not just in Minneapolis, where the city council voted to abolish its police department, but also across the country.

In NYC, mayor Bill de Blasio has cut the police budget, halted the hiring of more officers, and disbanded the NYPD’s plain-clothes ‘anti-crime’ unit, credited with taking thousands of illegal guns off the street. 

This, Moskos says, has meant a withdrawal of police from high-crime areas that has sent violence in the city skyrocketing. In June alone, 270 people were shot in the city, a 154 per cent increase on the previous year

The stories behind the statistics are heartbreaking. At a Brooklyn cookout a few Sundays ago, one-year-old Davell Gardner Jr was shot dead in his stroller. 

Such horrors, Moskos says, reflect a police department in collapse, as a consequence of political choices:

‘I compare it to Jenga, because they kept pulling away these blocks of policing. And individually, it wouldn’t matter. If they had gotten rid of plainclothes cops first, the foundation would have stood. But they pulled one too many, and suddenly the whole thing’s come tumbling down.’

For New York City, this looks as though it will cap the end of a remarkable period of (relative) safety.

The crime drop experienced across America in the 1990s was particularly pronounced in New York. In 2019, there were 319 murders in the city, marking an 86 per cent decline from 1990.

‘Given the number of shootings in the past 28 days, if that becomes the yearly average, we frittered away half of [the violent-crime drop] overnight’, Moskos says. 

‘The NYPD is arguably the best police department America has ever seen. But we have to dismantle it, because, you see, a cop killed a man in Minnesota. It just makes no sense to me.’

Indeed, even on the lightning-rod issue of the day – police killings – the NYPD has a striking record:

‘Cops in New York this year have killed three people, which is now typical for New York. All three of them had fired guns and two of them had murdered somebody. What else can they do?’

There are thousands of police departments in the US, all with varying records, practises and problems. But the protests, Moskos says, take no account of this, leading politicians in cities where police are actually getting a lot of things right to cave in to demands to defund police.

It is ultimately black and Hispanic communities, Moskos says, who will pay the price for all this. Defunding or defanging police is ‘going to cause more people to die, and more black people to die’, he says, bluntly.

‘I find it interesting now, with this recent increase in violence, newspapers won’t mention the race of victims. The New York Times is obsessed with racial disparity. And there’s a chance that 100 per cent of shooting victims recently have been black or Hispanic. I mean, normally it’s like 97 per cent. So, there might be a white person in there. But there’s a chance that it is literally 100 per cent of shooting victims in New York are black and Hispanic this year, and they don’t even mention it… at some point, that’s just racist negligence.’

Moskos is no tough-on-crime conservative who thinks law and order is the answer to the problems of America’s inner cities. 

He is a prison abolitionist. He says the war on drugs has destroyed black communities and helped to plunge them into unending cycles of violence. He thinks a European social welfare system would do much to address America’s deep-seated problems of racial and class inequality.

But he is also practically minded, and believes that in the absence of the big changes, you need to do what works in the here and now. 

For him this means proactive policing – cops clearing drug corners, maintaining order and giving communities the space they need to reassert control over their own neighbourhoods. (This does not, he stresses, mean locking more people up – incarceration, he points out, went down in New York as police became more proactive and crime fell.)

‘Police serve a role in crime prevention’, he says. ‘And that is not an accepted fact, especially in the academic world.’ For decades, he says, academia has been in thrall to the ‘root causes’ explanation for crime.

‘We should focus on poverty and unemployment and racism and structural inequality and healthcare. All those things matter… but policing has to do with the cards we are dealt. I don’t want to wait for society to be fixed.’

Police have to be part of the solution, he says, and this is why the anti-police narrative and the misleading claims about endemic police racism need to be challenged.

‘The idea that this is a national emergency, or that police are out executing black men, it’s demonstrably false, we know from the numbers now’, he says. ‘Yes, there’s a racial disparity, but there’s a racial disparity everywhere in America. The racial disparity doesn’t seem to be incredibly out of whack when taking other variables into account, including perpetrators of violent crime.’

A study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer found in 2016 that while black people are more likely to be manhandled and pepper-sprayed by police, there is no racial disparity in terms of lethal force when all context is taken into account. Fryer, an African-American, called it ‘the most surprising result of my career’.

Far more important to look at here, Moskos says, are regional disparities in police killings.

‘If we could get California down to the national average, California alone, that would save one hundred or two hundred lives. That seems kind of doable, but then we have to move away from the laser-like focus on race.’

‘To put it bluntly’, he adds, ‘white people get shot too, and for a long time, people didn’t believe that, because usually those shootings don’t become national news because there’s no racial angle’. 

‘If you want to reduce shootings, we can do it and we should do it, but at some point you do have to keep it in perspective.’

Moskos is the first to say so when he thinks cops and police departments get things wrong, but he’s almost unique in this field in actually knowing – and liking – the people he is criticising. 

Cop in the Hood is candid about the problems of policing, but it also gives police officers themselves a fair shake, who quickly absorbed him into the fold when he joined to write his book.

‘They were more tolerant of me as a liberal Harvard grad student than l think liberal Harvard grad students would be of them’, he says. ‘A lot of the misunderstanding comes from that class snobbery.’

Cops are one group of public servants largely untouched by political correctness, and Cop in the Hood quotes some pretty robust exchanges between cops about the neighbourhoods they work in.

At one point, one white cop wonders out loud about ‘napalm[ing] the whole area’. A black cop disagrees, suggesting ‘flood[ing] the place, biblical-like’, would be preferable.

But we can perhaps forgive them for being a bit jaded. ‘Police officers don’t see the good. That’s not their job’, writes Moskos. ‘Nobody calls 911 to report a graduation party, an anniversary, or another hard day at work. People don’t need police when they’re happy and everything is going well. Police see misery at its best.’

‘Some people are so critical of policing and really do have no clue as to what the job actually entails’, he tells me. ‘Cops have to deal with dead people. And yes, you remove yourself and you make tasteless jokes about murders and all that, but at some point cops believe, and sometimes for good reason, that they are the only people who care.’ 

When Moskos was a cop, more than 10 per cent of men in Baltimore’s Eastern District were murdered before the age of 35. ‘It’s disturbing to see that level of deprivation’, he tells me. 

‘When you see some three-year-old kid on a mattress without sheets and there’s no electricity in the house and bottles of piss in the corner and mom’s turning tricks. I mean, the kid has no chance.’

The response of many cops to the Black Lives Matter movement, he says, was ‘how dare you say I don’t care about black lives?’.

The dangers of paternalism is a recurring thread in Moskos’s work. The American criminal justice system, he writes, has been shaped by moral crusaders who deepened the problems they set out to solve.

Prisons are a key example. His 2011 book In Defence of Flogging explores how cruel and damaging the prison system is by comparing it to corporal punishment, which prisons were originally brought in to replace.

The gambit of the book, he tells me, is a simple thought experiment: imagine you’ve been convicted of a crime, and you’re asked to choose between five years in prison or five Singapore-style lashes. What would you choose?

‘Pretty much everyone chooses the Singapore-style lashes’, he says. ‘But we don’t allow that because it’s incomprehensible, cruel and unusual. So instead we do something that’s worse.’

Prisons were introduced to America by Quakers in the 18th century, championed as a more enlightened alternative to the floggings, executions and public shamings of the old world. 

They were called penitentiaries because they were intended as places of repentance. They stemmed from a ‘firm and paternalistic conviction that crime is a moral disease’, Moskos writes.

But not only has prison proved ineffective at reforming criminals, it has also fuelled crime. ‘When released, people who go to prison are more likely to commit a crime than similar criminals who don’t go to prison’, he writes. 

Moreover, the rise of mass incarceration in recent decades has gutted entire communities. ‘When too many young men from one neighbourhood are in the criminal justice system… the area reaches a tipping point, after which it can’t function properly’, he writes. ‘Crime increases because a significant proportion of the male population is not present.’

‘We’ve normalised a system that I think is worse than corporal punishment’, Moskos tells me. ‘The caveat is that there are a few people who we’re just afraid of, who we actually lock up because we don’t want them to kill us. But that number is so small. A few thousand people in America, probably.’

The prison population in America was 2.3million in 2016.

‘We have more prisoners than China, and they have a billion more people than we do’, he writes in In Defence of Flogging.

Another progressive paternalism that continues to haunt America is prohibition. While the ‘war on drugs’ was coined by Richard Nixon, its logic, Moskos argues, sprung from the ‘progressive’ prohibitionist movement, responsible for America’s disastrous 13-year experiment with alcohol prohibition from 1920 to 1933.

Just as prohibition of alcohol fuelled organised crime, the war on drugs is fuelling violence in America’s inner cities, he says. ‘Not all violence is directly related to the drug trade, but a lot of it is. 

It stems from it. You’re creating a group of people who are by choice and necessity outside the law, who have to be armed.’

For Moskos, it seems, the anti-police movements of today fit into this tradition of progressive paternalism, of well-meaning white reformers pushing their morality and ideological experiments on to the poor.

‘It’s a bunch of white progressives telling black people that they don’t need police’, he tells me. ‘They could try it in their neighborhood first, but they don’t want to do that.’ 

‘Before I would just say it’s paternalistic or wrong. Now I’m just saying this is racist. If you’re white and telling other neighbourhoods they don’t need police, and they’re getting killed… it’s horrible.’

Indeed, another disparity we often don’t talk about is the one between white and black attitudes to police numbers. In 2015, a Gallup poll found black Americans were 20 per cent more likely than white Americans to say that they wanted more police on their streets.

‘We have young white people yelling at older black cops and screaming that they’re racist’, Moskos goes on, nodding to some of the more absurd viral moments of the recent protests. ‘I mean, the protests were whiter than the police department.’ 

He is currently working on a book about the 1990s New York crime drop, an oral history based on the recollections of cops. Now that violence in the city is spiralling again, it must be a bittersweet undertaking. 

Mournfully, Moskos says all the city needs to do to bring violence down again is ‘start doing what we were doing literally one year ago’. But he’s not hopeful of this happening any time soon.

‘There’s no political consequence to politicians of rising crime, especially in cities that don’t have a diverse political slate’, he says. ‘That’s the problem: if murders went back to 1,000 [a year in New York], it affects politicians less than if cops killed one person.’

‘At some point someone has to push back on the narrative. But that won’t happen, because of politics… I could be wrong, things could be less bleak. But I’ve never been this pessimistic, ever.’"

The 1619 Project: When ‘History’ Isn’t History

By Noah Rothman of Commentary.

"The New York Times’ 1619 Project has a conflicted relationship with history.

According to New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, this symposium of essays could be many things at once. At times, the “goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history” by “placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” But the Project also explores everyday phenomena and “reveals its history.” The Project’s more literary works “bring to life key moments in American history.” But sometimes, those literary works are preceded by a more familiar accounting of historical events “to which the author is responding.” The compendium is simultaneously a contribution to the sum of our historical knowledge and a critique of it.

That would not be a controversial approach if this collection of essays was billed as what it is: “narrative journalism.” But the “1619 Project” fast acquired a reputation as a definitive account of America’s untold origins, and its authors did not protest. Oprah Winfrey and the film distributor Lionsgate are partnering with the architect of the Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, to “develop a multi-media history of slavery and its effects in America for a worldwide audience.” Colleges and museums hosted exhibitions inspired by these essays. Primary school districts across the country are adding the Project’s essays to their K-12 history curriculum.

All this has occurred even as practicing historians expressed skepticism about the relative historical value of the Project. Last December, five historians—Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, and James Oakes—took issue with the 1619 Project’s central and most contentious claim: that the nation’s founding date is not 1776 but a century and a half earlier. “[T]he project asserts the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain’ in order to ensure slavery would continue,’” these scholars wrote, “This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding—yet every statement offered by the Project to validate it is false.” The Times took note and, accordingly, corrected the “original language” to reflect the facts while still defending “the basic point” of the offending essay.

But that was hardly the only source of frustration among academicians. Historians took exception to one essay’s contention that the disaggregation of the black family can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries. They balked at the Project’s exhumation of a demonstrably false assertion that slavery disproportionately contributed to the country’s wealth. Most of all, they objected to the Project’s self-aggrandizing claim that the study of slavery—both its origins and its aftermath—is an underexplored field of study and instruction.

The Pulitzer Prize Committee subversively adjudicated this dispute when it awarded Hannah-Jones the Pulitzer for the category “commentary”—not some more empirical genre like, for example, history. Nevertheless, the Times maintained that the Project’s most controversial essays remain “grounded in the historical record” and are not “driven by ideology rather than historical understanding.”

Apparently, Nikole Hannah-Jones disagrees.

“I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history,” she recently averred. “It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory.” Hannah-Jones continued: “The crazy thing is, the 1619 Project is using history and reporting to make an argument. It never pretended to be a history.” Indeed, when it comes to primary education, “the curriculum is supplementary and cannot and was never intended to supplant U.S. history curriculum.” That is, indeed, quite reasonable. Even if we assume K-12 students are equipped to “interrogate” the “narrative” of America’s Founding, which they are not, such an enterprise amounts to indoctrination if the student has not yet internalized the basics. You cannot “critically deconstruct” a narrative with which you’re unfamiliar.

This was a reasonable concession to the avalanche of good faith criticism the Project received from the scholarly community. Or, at least, it would have been if Hannah-Jones had not so vehemently objected to the efforts by Sen. Tom Cotton to prevent the teaching of this document in public schools as though it were uncontested fact.

Cotton’s initiative, which is more a political statement than legislation, would strip schools of federal funding equivalent to the amount of instructional time dedicated to teaching the 1619 Project. “This bill speaks to the power of journalism more than anything I’ve ever done in my career,” Hannah-Jones wrote while promoting the Pulitzer Center’s “educational resources and curricula” designed to “bring ‘The 1619 Project’ into your classroom.” American education, implied in the series of articles she subsequently promoted, does not adequately teach “the history of American slavery.” And what is objective knowledge anyway? “LOL,” the Pulitzer-recipient wrote when confronted with Civil War historian James MacPherson’s assertion that the project “lacked context and perspective. “Right,” she continued, “because white historians have produced truly objective history.”

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that American primary education fails to explore many aspects of American history—the legacy of slavery being just one of those deficiencies. But instructional time dedicated to history has, along with the study of civics, been subordinated to a dozen other objectives educators are compelled to pursue. It would seem unwise to sacrifice more of that precious classroom time to the examination of tendentious tracts that are, by their own architect’s admission, not history, per se, but rather an argument over narratives. Students should learn the history first and argue over it later."

Assessing Unemployment Insurance, Incentives and Economic Activity

By Veronique de Rugy.

"Earlier this year, the U.S. government passed the largest piece of stimulus legislation in our nation's history. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act included a very generous expansion of unemployment insurance benefits. The idea was to help people to keep paying their bills during the forced COVID-19 shutdowns. These benefits are expiring, and Congress is now fighting over whether to extend them as they are or to modify them.

The proper approach is to phase these benefits out as quickly as possible.

It is typical that during nationwide economic downturns the federal government provides supplemental funding to boost the unemployment insurance, or UI, provided by the states. But this time around, the expansion was unusually massive. For those eligible for UI, the legislation provided a $600 weekly bonus on top of the unemployment benefits provided by the states. But the bill also expanded eligibility to millions who would not have qualified otherwise, such as many workers who remain employed part time and hourly workers. That means that the Uber driver who lost most of his income during the lockdown and the wife of a banker offering a few hours of private yoga lessons a week are now receiving the state benefits plus the bonus.

Expanding the benefits made sense at the beginning of the crisis. You don't want workers out looking for a job in the middle of a pandemic because they can't feed their family or pay their rent. This was especially important because state and local governments forced hundreds of thousands of businesses to shut down, forcing them to let go of their workers. 

What made little sense was the scale of the expansion. One study found that two-thirds of the recipients made more money from unemployment than from working, so much so that disposable income increased by 5.4% between February and May.

While it's tempting to cheer the ability of UI to alleviate the pain of the recession, it's not all good news. UI puts money in people's pockets, but the negative impact of the program is well documented. Many studies find that UI benefits create an incentive for workers to delay looking for jobs until the expiration of the benefit. This finding was confirmed by many other studies, including one by economist Alan Krueger, who, in 2008, noted, "Job search increases sharply in the weeks prior to benefit exhaustion." The more generous the benefit the bigger the effects.

In addition, during normal times, UI struggles with a large amount of improper claims — according to some estimates, by nearly 11% of its payments. Under the coronavirus relief bill expansion, the unusually large number of cases that will have to be processed by unemployment offices makes it quite unrealistic to expect that dubious claims will be more thoroughly filtered out. In other words, expect a lot of fraud and abuse.

With a July 31 expiration date on the UI bonus and eligibility expansions, House Democrats want them renewed and extended until March 2021. Senate Republicans are offering a $200 weekly bonus for a few months. But the economic reality dictates that the expansion needs to be put on a glide path to zero as soon as possible. To be sure, losing the bonus means a reduction of disposable income for some workers. That's a design flaw of the expansion by those who thought it was a good idea to pay people more when they don't work than when they do work. As such, it shouldn't be used as an argument against returning to a better-designed expansion. Besides, some of the loss can be minimized by going back to work.

What's more, even if one supports expanding UI during rough times, we must remember that whether the money is borrowed or taxed, this redistribution of income comes out of the real economy at the expense of other investments that are likely more valuable. This important reality looms especially large as the economy reopens, and businesses have a long road ahead just to survive.

The difficulties for oversight paired with the generosity of the benefits will continue to reduce both employment and economic output if legislators fail to reform the program. Now is not the time to add more bad policies to the damage already done by COVID-19."

Why some people who haven't had Covid-19 might already have some immunity

By Jacqueline Howard of CNN.

"The immune systems of some people who have not been exposed to the novel coronavirus could have some familiarity with the pathogen -- possibly helping to reduce the severity of illness if that person does get Covid-19, a new study suggests.

The study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, found that among a sample of 68 healthy adults in Germany who had not been exposed to the coronavirus, 35% had T cells in their blood that were reactive to the virus.

 

T cells are part of the immune system and help protect the body from infection. T cell reactivity suggests that the immune system might have had some previous experience fighting a similar infection and may use that memory to help fight a new infection.

So how could their immune system have reactive T cells if they never had Covid-19? They were "probably acquired in previous infections with endemic" coronaviruses, the researchers -- from various institutions in Germany and the United Kingdom -- wrote in the new study. Using this T cell memory from another-yet-similar infection to respond to a new infection is called "cross-reactivity."

'The big question is ... understanding what the role of those T cells might be'

The new study involved analyzing blood samples from 18 Covid-19 patients, ages 21 to 81, and healthy donors, ages 20 to 64, based in Germany. The study found that T cells reactive to the coronavirus were detected in 83% of the Covid-19 patients.

 

While the researchers also found pre-existing cross-reactive T cells in the healthy donors, they wrote in the study that the impact those cells might have on the outcome of a Covid-19 illness still remains unknown.

The study findings certainly call for more research, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, who was not involved in the new study.

 

"It does appear in this study that there is a significant proportion of individuals that have this cross-reactive T cell immunity from other coronavirus infections that may have some impact on how they fare with the novel coronavirus. I think the big question is trying to jump from the fact that they have these T cells to understanding what the role of those T cells might be," Adalja said.

 "We know, for example, children and younger adults are relatively spared from the severe consequences of this disease, and I think that one hypothesis might be that the pre-existing T cells that exist may be much more numerous or more active in younger age cohorts than in older age cohorts," Adalja said. 

 

"And if you could compare people maybe with severe and mild illness and try and look at the T cells in those individuals and say, 'Are people who have severe disease less likely to have cross reactive T cells versus people who have mild disease maybe having more cross reactive T cells?' I think that there's biological plausibility to that hypothesis," he said. "It's clear though that the T cell presence doesn't prevent people from getting infected, but does it modulate the severity of infection? That's what it appears could be the case."

 

So far during the coronavirus pandemic, much focus has been on Covid-19 antibodies and the role they play in building immunity against the disease. 

 

But infectious disease expert Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville who was not involved in the new study, said that T cells can not be overlooked. 

 

"Here's a study that suggests actually there may be some cross-reactivity -- some priming of the pump if you will -- with the normal conventional coronaviruses that cause colds in humans and there may be some cross-reactivity with the Covid virus that's causing so much damage. That's in and of itself intriguing because we had thought from the antibody perspective that there wasn't much cross at all," Schaffner said. 

 

"It's not entirely surprising because these are all members of a family. It's as though they're cousins in the same family," he said. "Now we have to see whether there is any impact of this in clinical practice. ... Does it make it more or less likely that the person who is infected with Covid actually will develop an illness? And does it have any implications for vaccine development?"

'Almost every person in the world has had some encounter with a coronavirus'

Adalja added that he was not surprised to see this T cell cross-reactivity in the study participants who had not been exposed to the novel coronavirus, named SARS-CoV-2.

 

"SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh human coronavirus that has been discovered, and four of the human coronaviruses are what we call community-acquired coronaviruses, and together those four are responsible for 25% of our common colds," Adalja said. "Almost every person in the world has had some encounter with a coronavirus, and since they are all part of the same family, there is some cross reactive immunity that develops."

 

The new Nature study isn't the only paper to suggest a certain level of pre-existing immunity among some people to the novel coronavirus.

 

Alessandro Sette and Shane Crotty, both of the University of California, San Diego, wrote in a comment paper published in the journal Nature earlier this month, that "20--50% of unexposed donors display significant reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 antigen peptide pools," based on separate research -- but they noted that the source and clinical relevance of the reactivity remains unknown.

 

Sette and Crotty wrote that "it is now established that SARS-CoV-2 pre-existing immune reactivity exists to some degree in the general population. It is hypothesized, but not yet proven, that this might be due to immunity to" common cold coronaviruses."

Dutch government will not advise public to wear masks - minister

From Reuters.

"The Dutch government on Wednesday said it will not advise the public to wear masks to slow the spread of coronavirus, asserting that their effectiveness has not been proven. 

The decision was announced by Minister for Medical Care Tamara van Ark after a review by the country’s National Institute for Health (RIVM). The government will instead seek better adherence to social distancing rules after a surge in coronavirus cases in the country this week, Van Ark said at a press conference in The Hague.

“Because from a medical perspective there is no proven effectiveness of masks, the Cabinet has decided that there will be no national obligation for wearing non-medical masks” Van Ark said.

The decision bucks the trend as many European countries have made masks mandatory in stores or crowded outdoor areas.

RIVM chief Jaap van Dissel said that the organization was aware of studies that show masks help slow the spread of disease but it was not convinced they will help during the current coronavirus outbreak in the Netherlands.

He argued wearing masks incorrectly, together with worse adherence to social distancing rules, could increase the risk of transmitting the disease.

“So we think that if you’re going to use masks (in a public setting) ... then you must give good training for it,” he said.

Mask are currently required only on public transportation in the Netherlands and in airports.

The decision followed a meeting of health and government officials after new coronavirus cases in the country rose to 1,329 in the past week, an increase of more than a third.

Dutch cases have risen steadily since July 1, when the government announced an easing of lockdown measures to include restaurants and public gatherings if people maintain a 1.5 meter (five foot) physical distance."

CDC Director Says There are More Suicides and Overdoses than COVID Deaths Among High School Students

See CDC Director Compares Rate of Suicides to COVID-19 Deaths by Micaela Burrow of Townhall.

"Center for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield said in a Buck Institute webinar that suicides and drug overdoses have surpassed the death rate for COVID-19 among high school students.

Redfield argued that lockdowns and lack of public schooling constituted a disproportionally negative impact on young peoples’ mental health.

"But there has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools," Redfield said. "We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID. So this is why I keep coming back for the overall social being of individuals, is let’s all work together and find out how we can find common ground to get these schools open in a way that people are comfortable and their safe."

Roughly 146,000 people have died from COVID or COVID-related causes in the U.S., according to CDC data.
The most recent publicized federal data records 48,000 deaths from suicide and at least 1.4 million attempts in 2018. In 2019, almost 71,000 people died from drug overdoses.

Where Redfield obtained his data is unknown, although a doctor at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, CA claimed the facility has “seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.” He did not say how many deaths occurred, or whether the statement was exaggerated for emphasis.

"What I have seen recently, I have never seen before," Hansen said. "I have never seen so much intentional injury,” said a nurse from the same hospital.

And while health authorities will not have verified data regarding suicides and drug overdoses in 2020 for two more years, local reporting indicates that suicide fatalities have increased year-on-year.

According to the American Medical Association, “More than 35 states have reported increases in opioid-related mortality as well as ongoing concerns for those with a mental illness or substance use disorder in counties and other areas within the state.”

In Eagle County, Colorado, six suicides have been recorded, just one below the yearly average. Colorado on the whole recorded a 40 percent decrease in suicides in March and April, but the number of calls to Colorado Crisis Services increased 48 percent.

The Chicago Sun-Times looked specifically at black populations. In Cook County, Illinois, the number of suicide deaths is already higher than for all of 2019.

In Yakima County, Washington, the suicide rate has risen 30 percent, according to the county coroner.

Between March 15 and April 29, as many people commited suicide in Queens, New York than did between January 1 and April 29 the year prior.

The Pima County Health Department in Arizona has recorded an uptick in suicide rates as well.

Ulster County reported a significant increase in both suicides and drug overdoses, both fatal and non-fatal.

Historical trends give reason to believe the suicide rate may rise due to extenuating circumstances caused by COVID-19, including unemployment and social isolation. For example, in the year after the Great Recession in 2008, the rate in America was 6.4 percent higher than expected. While the rate didn’t’ “skyrocket,” as some have predicted it will this year, the coronavirus pandemic and economic shutdown has dealt a worse blow to the U.S. psyche.

Thirty to 40 million jobs have been lost to the economic shutdown, compared to 2.6 million in 2008."

Five ways lockdowns could be killing people

By Timothy P. Carney of The Washington Examiner.

"Amid this pandemic, masks probably save lives by suppressing the spread of droplets that could carry the virus. Social distancing, especially avoiding crowded indoor places, also saves lives. Closing schools, churches, stores, offices, gyms, and other institutions was necessary. It may still be necessary.

But as we consider the ways lockdowns might save lives by reducing the spread of the virus, we should also consider the many ways that the lockdowns cost lives. In short: loss of medical treatment, suicides, drinking, drugs, and violence.

· Children are not getting medical treatment, and adults are missing cancer screenings and treatments.

· Missing school, friends, sports, community, high school children are killing themselves at higher rates, and adults may be committing suicide at a higher rate.

· Alcohol consumption is way up.

· Drug use is way up. And drug overdoses went way up following stay-at-home orders.

· It’s also not implausible to attribute higher murder rates to the lockdowns that deprive young people of anything else to do, including jobs and recreation.

As policymakers try to weigh the health risks of opening up schools and businesses, they should consider the health risks of keeping society closed. It’s not merely that people have less money when businesses are closed. The cost-benefit is not lives versus GDP. In part, it's lives versus lives. People have less money, nothing to do, less access to friends. That leaves them with less purpose in life, less support, and less sense of belonging.

This alienation leads to violence, abuse, drugs, drinking, and other deadly behavior."

Economic recovery requires the government to stop what it's doing

By Benjamin Powell. He is a professor of economics at Texas Tech University.

"Republicans and Democrats are debating what to include in yet another federal coronavirus relief bill. Meanwhile, the states are in various stages of “opened up” or “locked down,” with state and local politicians regulating the minutiae of our interactions right down to what constitutes a “meal” in order to determine which establishments may serve alcoholic beverages. 

The politicians all need to stop. Just stop. 

Senate Republicans have proposed a new $1 trillion dollar spending plan. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wants a $3 trillion bill. Neither plan would stimulate our economy in the short run, but both would make the economy worse in the long run.

The U.S. economy is stagnating because of COVID-19 and the state and local shutdown and limited-reopening restrictions. 

In a sense, some of this stagnation is optimal, given the existence of COVID-19. It poses a health risk to all Americans and a more significant risk to older people and people with preexisting conditions. Economic activities that consumers perceived as most risky were going to contract in the short run even without any government prohibitions.  

What would you expect with fewer people willing to travel, go to restaurants and gyms, or attend sporting events and concerts? This stagnation will cure itself in the longer run, however, as labor and capital are reallocated from these industries to other industries, or as risk from COVID-19 decreases — whether from a vaccine, treatment, or herd immunity. 

However, much of the economic stagnation was imposed by the government. New unemployment claims surged to record levels in late March and early April as most state governments across the country imposed lockdowns. The unemployment rate, which peaked in April at 14.7 percent, began falling in May and June (11.1 percent) as many states began easing their shutdown restrictions and allowing some people to go back to work. 

More people would have gone back to work if Congress had not included a $600 weekly boost to state unemployment benefits with the $2 trillion COVID-19-relief bill it passed in March. That bill raised the combined federal and state unemployment benefits above the average wage of the jobs lost in 38 states. 

Paying people more not to work than to work is a sure-fire way to prolong economic stagnation. Unfortunately, House Democrats are trying to extend this provision until January in their new proposal.  

A new federal COVID-19 bill would not stimulate the economy because the vast majority of the spending in both the Republican and Democratic versions would not and/or could not address the two fundamental causes of our economic stagnation. 

If most of the new spending were on speeding the development of a vaccine, improved treatments, or increased hospital capacity, one might plausibly argue that the spending could decrease the drag on the economy caused by the risk of COVID-19. But neither plan focuses on measures like these. 

Federal spending also couldn’t negate orders from state and local officials that prevent people from working and consuming goods and services. Perhaps an “anti-spending” bill could pressure states to decrease their restrictions by taking away federal funds from those that do not abolish their lockdown orders. But, again, that’s not being proposed. 

Either bill would be bad for the economy in the long run because, at $1 trillion to $3 trillion, either would significantly add to the $3.8 trillion federal deficit forecast for 2020. Ultimately, accumulated deficits are paid for with higher taxes in the future. Those higher taxes will contract long-run economic activity. 

The federal government should stop passing relief bills because more spending would likely harm our economic recovery more than help it. State and local government busybodies need to stop regulating how businesses and consumers cooperate so that people can figure out how to do it themselves. Our economy would improve more quickly if we could just get all of our politicians to stop what they’ve been doing."

Is the Anti-Racism Training Industry Just Peddling White Supremacy?

By Jonathan Chait.

"There’s an old syllogism used to describe desperate politicians: (1) We must do something; (2) This is something; (3) We must do this. In the wake of mass national demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s murder, many white people — including leaders of businesses, schools, and nonprofit organizations — have grasped for some concrete step they can take to redress systemic racism. They have found that something: the burgeoning anti-racism training industry, whose most famous theorist and practitioner is Robin DiAngelo, whose book White Fragility rocketed to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

Daniel Bergner has a long profile of DiAngelo and her fellow anti-racism trainers in the New York Times. The story is far more devastating than it might appear at a casual glance. It reveals a business model spreading kooky, harmful, and outright racist ideas.

The anti-racism consulting industry does deserve both some sympathy and some credit. Its intention, to prod white Americans into more awareness of their own racism, is beneficent. And their premise that white people are often unaware of the degree to which racial privilege has enabled their success, which they can mistakenly attribute entirely to merit and effort, is correct. American society is shot through with multiple overlapping systems of racial bias — from exposure to harmful pollution to biased policing to unequal access to education to employment discrimination — that in combination sustain massive systemic inequality.

But the anti-racism trainers go beyond denying the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether. Indeed, their teaching presents individuals as a racist myth. In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity.

One of DiAngelo’s favorite examples is instructive. She uses the famous story of Jackie Robinson. Rather than say “he broke through the color line,” she instructs people instead to describe him as “Jackie Robinson, the first Black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”

It is true, of course, that Robinson was not the first Black man who was good enough at baseball to make a major-league roster. The Brooklyn Dodgers decided, out of a combination of idealism and self-interest, to violate the norm against signing Black players. And Robinson was chosen due to a combination of his skill and extraordinary personality that allowed him to withstand the backlash in store for the first Black major leaguer. It is not an accident that DiAngelo changes the story to eliminate Robinson’s agency and obscure his heroic qualities. It’s the point. Her program treats individual merit as a myth to be debunked. Even a figure as remarkable as Robinson is reduced to a mere pawn of systemic oppression.

One way to understand this thinking is to place it on a spectrum of thought about race. On the far right is open white supremacy, which instructs white people to fight for their interests as white people. (Hence the 14-word slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”) Moving to the left, standard-issue conservatism tends to discount the existence of racism and treat all problems in pure color-blind terms, as though racism has been banished. To the left of that is standard liberalism, which acknowledges the existence of racism as a problem that complicates simple race-neutral solutions.

The ideology of the racism-training industry is distinctively to the left of that. It collapses all identity into racial categories. “It is crucial for white people to acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience,” writes DiAngelo, whose teachings often encourage the formation of racial affinity groups. The program does not allow any end point for the process of racial consciousness. Racism is not a problem white people need to overcome in order to see people who look different as fully human — it is totalizing and inescapable.

Of course, DiAngelo’s whites-only groups are not dreamed up in the same spirit as David Duke’s. The problem is that, at some point, the extremes begin to functionally resemble each other despite their mutual antipathy.

I want to make clear that when I compare the industry’s conscious racialism to the far right, I am not accusing it of “reverse racism” or bias against white people. In some cases its ideas literally replicate anti-Black racism.

Glenn Singleton, president of Courageous Conversation, a racial-sensitivity training firm, tells Bergner that valuing “written communication over other forms” is “a hallmark of whiteness,” as is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.”

This is not some idiosyncratic oddball notion. The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation. The museum’s page summarizes what it calls “white culture” in this astonishing graphic:

Photo: NMAAHC

 

“White” values include things like “objective, rational thinking”; “cause and effect relationships”; “hard work is the key to success”; “plan for the future”; and “delayed gratification.” The source for this chart is another, less-artistic chart written by Judith Katz in 1990. Katz has a doctorate in education and moved into the corporate consulting world in 1985, where, according to her résumé, she has “led many transformational change initiatives.” It is not clear what in Katz’s field of study allowed her to establish such sweeping conclusions about the innate culture of white people versus other groups.

One way to think through these cultural generalizations is to measure them against its most prominent avatar for racial conflict, Donald Trump. How closely does he reflect so-called white values? The president hardly even pretends to believe that “hard work” is the key to success. The Trump version of his alleged success is that he’s a genius who improvises his way to brilliant deals. The realistic version is that he’s a lazy heir who inherited and cheated his way to riches, and spends most of his time watching television. Trump is likewise incapable of delayed gratification, planning for the future, and regards “objective rational thinking” with distrust. On the other hand, Barack Obama is deeply devoted to all those values.

Now, every rule has its exceptions. Perhaps the current (white) president happens to be alienated from the white values that the previous (Black) president identified with strongly. But attaching the values in question to real names brings to life a point the racism trainers seem to elide: These values are not neutral at all. Hard work, rational thought, and careful planning are virtues. White racists traditionally project the opposite of these traits onto Black people and present them as immutable flaws. Jane Coaston, who has reported extensively on the white-nationalist movement, summarizes it, “The idea that white people are just good at things, or are better inherently, more clean, harder working, more likely to be on time, etc.”

In his profile, Bergner asked DiAngelo how she could reject “rationalism” as a criteria for hiring teachers, on the grounds that it supposedly favors white candidates. Don’t poor children need teachers to impart skills like that so they have a chance to work in a high-paying profession employing reasoning skills?

DiAngelo’s answer seems to imply that she would abolish these high-paying professions altogether:

“Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”

(Presumably DiAngelo’s ideal socialist economy would keep in place at least some well-paid professions — say, “diversity consultant,” which earns her a comfortable seven-figure income.)

Singleton, likewise, proposed evolutionary social changes to the economy that would render it unnecessary to teach writing and linear thought to minority children. Bergner writes:

I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. “If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,” he said, “then that makes sense.” He invoked, instead, a journey toward “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.”

Whether or not a world along these lines will ever exist, or is even possible to design, is at best uncertain. What is unquestionably true is that these revolutionary changes will not be completed within the lifetime of anybody currently alive. Which is to say, a program to deny the value of teaching so-called white values to Black children is to condemn them to poverty. Unsurprisingly, Bergner’s story shows two educators exposed to the program and rebelling against it. One of them, Leslie Chislett, had to endure some ten anti-racism training sessions before eventually snapping at the irrationality of a program that denigrates learning. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees,” she says, “and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values?”

Ibram X. Kendi, another successful entrepreneur in the anti-racism field, has a more frontal response to this problem. The achievement gap — the long-standing difference in academic performance between Black and white children — is a myth, he argues. The supposed gap merely reflects badly designed tests, he argues. It does not matter to him how many different kinds of measures of academic performance show this to be true. Nor does he seem receptive to the possibility that the achievement gap reflects environmental factors (mainly worse schools, but also access to nutrition, health care, outside learning, and so on) rather than any innate differences.

Kendi, like DiAngelo, argues that racism must be defined objectively. Intent does not matter, only effect. Their own intentions are surely admirable. But the fact is that their insistence on denying that America provides its Black children worse educations inhibits working toward a solution. Denying the achievement gap, like denying the gap in how police treat white and Black people, seems to objectively entrench racism.

It’s easy enough to see why executives and school administrators look around at a country exploding in righteous indignation at racism, and see the class of consultants selling their program of mystical healing as something that looks vaguely like a solution. But one day DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself."