What To Know Today
NEW from THE TRACE: How a Newark program is pushing police and community members to heal old wounds together. In a handful of cities, interactions between police and communities have grown so tense that municipal leaders have turned to various forms of conflict resolution sessions, where residents and the cops get professional guidance as they talk and hash out differences. Trauma to Trust, which launched in 2016, is Newark’s spin on such a program, an attempt to get the two sides to better understand each other’s stress and trauma in a city racked by decades of conflict, tension, and strife. Five years since the program launched, about 500 people, including 220 police officers, have participated. “We want to get past us versus them,” Zayid Muhammad, a community activist who helps arrange the sessions, tells J. Brian Charles in a new piece.
New York Attorney General Letitia James subpoenas Susan LaPierre. The wide-ranging subpoena is related to James’s lawsuit to dissolve the NRA and relates to material covered in three Trace investigations — here, here, and most recently, here — that Mike Spies published with The New Yorker last year. In the most recent piece, Mike reported on misleading and possibly false statements Wayne LaPierre made under oath during the NRA’s bankruptcy proceedings last year, about topics that include his use of a vendor’s yacht and perks his niece received while on the NRA payroll. The Attorney General’s Office is seeking a number of things in the subpoena, including documents concerning the owner of the yacht and his wife, who both have stakes in multiple entities that do business with the NRA, as well as communications related to the LaPierres’ niece. The subpoena orders Susan LaPierre to furnish the documents by January 31 and appear for a deposition at NRA headquarters on February 4. You can read Mike’s follow-up about the news, and more about how the subpoena relates to our own reporting, on our site here.
Nearly 2 in 3 California adults have had at least indirect exposure to violence. That’s according to a study from the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center that sought to quantify how broad the social effects of gun violence might reverberate out from direct or witnessed victimization. The study was based on a state-representative survey conducted in July 2020 and assessed six possible indirect experiences of violence people have had, ranging from gunshots occurring in one’s neighborhood to knowing someone who had been a gun violence victim. Extrapolating from the sample, the researchers estimate that more than three million Californians had more than three experiences of violence over a year; about five million personally know more than one person who has been intentionally shot; and three million know people at risk of committing violence. “Our main conclusion is that almost everybody is touched by this, and we’re a state with relatively low rates of firearm violence,” lead author Garen Wintemute told Crime Report. “I would expect the situation would be worse in many other states.”
New York City man charged with threatening to kill Trump if he refused to leave office. The 71-year-old, Thomas Welnick, was arrested on Monday. Federal prosecutors said he also made threats to a dozen members of Congress in calls to Secret Service offices and law enforcement over the last year. “Welnicki bragged about how easy it was for him to acquire a firearm and added, ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I will stand up to fascism,’” reads the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.
Data Point
$500,000 — the latest funding commitment from the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research for research projects addressing gun violence prevention, an amount the organization says will cover about 10 dissertation or postdoctoral-level proposals. Since 2018, the collaborative has granted over $21 million to 44 different gun violence research projects. [NCGVR]
