What To Know Today
“How does a community begin to heal from a tragedy like this?” That’s the question posed in this article from Chicago’s The Triibe about how the Little Village neighborhood where Adam Toledo lived is reckoning with trauma in a city where officials have deflected responsibility for the teen’s death. Moreover, while the public school district has pointed to the availability of crisis counseling for the city’s youth, the article points out the relative lack of resources — just four crisis coordinators for 514 schools — compared to the school resource officers who operate in more than 50 high schools. “It’s almost impossible to create environments of healing when safety is compromised,” said Claudio Rivera, a clinical community psychologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital and assistant professor at Northwestern University. A vigil for peace: Over the weekend, neighborhood residents marched to remember Adam and call for more police accountability and an end to gun violence.
New group forms to support Asian-American gun owners. Reload, a new gun reporting site founded by Stephen Gutowksi, reports on the launch of Asian American and Pacific Islander Gun Owners, which seeks to promote gun safety and gun rights in the AAPI community, particularly for first-time owners. The formation of the group comes a year after we reported on a surge in gun buying by Asian-Americans fearful of racist attacks in response to the pandemic. There have been nearly 4,000 anti-Asian hate incidents nationwide documented in the intervening period. That context led Chris Cheng, an Asian-American gun-rights activist, to call the past 12 months a “game changer” for the community. Patrick Lopez, one of AAPIGO’s co-founders, tells Reload that he saw a lot of first-time gun buyers and wanted to create a forum for gun safety and education. “It just kind of hit me like, ‘It would be nice if there were a place where people of Asian descent can just get good information.’”
DOJ reverses Trump-era restriction on federal oversight of police departments. A consent decree, a legal agreement between the federal government and a city that stipulates a set of police reforms, was used more than a dozen times during the Obama administration — including in Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson, Missouri. But in 2018, Trump’s Department of Justice made it far more difficult to enact them. Now, President Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, has reinstated the use of settlement agreements to reform police departments. Criminal justice reformers have applauded the move. “In order to fix these departments, you don’t just need a few new policies. You need sustained compliance over a long period of time, and consent decrees are the only thing that can do that,” said the executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. Related from the Trace: Last week, J. Brian Charles documented the halting progress of reform efforts in Newark, New Jersey, which has been under a consent decree since 2016.
Supreme Court again to consider closely watched open carry case. The court has repeatedly delayed action on whether to hear NYSRPA v. Corlett, which could establish whether there’s a constitutional right to carry a gun outside the home. The court announced yesterday that it had relisted the case, meaning it will discuss it in conference on Friday. Judging by the past, the more times a case is relisted, the less likely it is to be reviewed. Meanwhile, the high court also declined to take four other gun cases.
Colorado enacts a lost or stolen firearms bill. The legislation requires a person to notify law enforcement if they’ve misplaced their firearm or had it stolen. Eleven other states require reporting of lost and stolen guns, which are a significant source of crime weapons. Colorado’s Democratic governor on Monday also signed a bill requiring gun owners to safely store their firearms.
A push for permitless carry in Texas hangs in the balance. With passage in four states in 2021, it’s already been a banner year for laws that allow the carrying of firearms without a state-issued permit; 19 states now have a version of the statute. But despite Texas’ GOP-controlled Legislature and strong gun-rights constituency, the lieutenant governor said that a House-passed bill currently lacks the votes in the state Senate.
Data Point
22 — the number of children under the age of 16 who police officers have fatally shot since 2015. [The Washington Post]