B.C. 
2 victims of deadly Lytton wildfire trying to have their lawsuit certified as a class action

Tue, February 7, 2023 

An RCMP vehicle drives past the remains of vehicles and structures in Lytton, B.C., on Friday, July 9, 2021, after a wildfire destroyed most of the village on June 30. 

(Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press - image credit)

Two victims of a wildfire that destroyed much of Lytton, B.C., in the summer of 2021 are in court arguing their lawsuit should be certified as a class action.

The chief justice of the B.C. Supreme Court will decide whether the case, initially filed in October of 2021 by two residents who lost their homes, has a broader scope.

Two people died when flames ripped through the Fraser Canyon on June 30, 2021, which happened to be the hottest day of the year in Canada.

By the time the wildfire was contained two months later, more than 800 square kilometres in and around the village had been destroyed.

Investigators with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada found no evidence that sparks from a passing train caused the fire, but the lawsuit alleges the fire was caused by a CN or CP train passing through the village.

In the alternative, it also alleges the fire was caused by failure to manage risk in fire-prone areas of British Columbia.

The B.C. Wildfire Service and the RCMP investigation continue.

RCMP Cpl. Madonna Saunderson issued a statement confirming the investigation "remains active and ongoing."

Victims seek compensation from CP, CN Rail

This week, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson is hearing from lawyers representing Jordan Spinks and Chris O'Connor.

They claim the fire could have been prevented and are seeking financial compensation from CP Rail, CN Rail, the attorney general of Canada and a number of other organizations.

In March of last year, the law firm Slater Vecchio was granted permission to pursue the case as a class action with O'Connor and Spinks as the lead plaintiffs.

If approved, dozens more fire victims could be added to the lawsuit, which will be heard later.

Gian Paolo Mendoza/CBC News

Tricia Thorpe, a farmer who lost many animals and her home when flames tore through the Fraser Canyon village in the summer of 2021, has been sitting in the courtroom listening to lawyers, who represent Spinks and O'Connor, argue in favour of class action certification.

"The fire travelled all the way over to Spences Bridge, up Highway 8 and destroyed houses over there, and people lost livestock. I wanted to be in the courtroom because there has been a lack of information and transparency," Thorpe told Daybreak Kamloops host Shelley Joyce.

She's not part of the initial lawsuit seeking financial compensation, but Thorpe said she hopes this week's hearing has a positive outcome.

"I would like somebody held accountable. Losing my animals was devastating. I'm hoping that somebody will be held accountable. There will be changes made on a federal or provincial level that would help prevent something like this from ever happening again," said Thorpe.

Thorpe now sits on the Thompson-Nicola regional district board as a director for the Lytton area. She was elected in October of 2022.

Thorpe clarified that she spoke with CBC as a victim of the fire and not as a TNRD representative.

The class action certification hearing before Hinkson is slated to last until Friday, February 10.

DISARM, DEMILITARIZE,DEFUND;  POLICE

Toll of police brutality on display at State of the Union


WASHINGTON (AP) — The toll of police brutality in America was on painful display Tuesday night as family members of Black men and women killed in custody sat among lawmakers in the House to hear the president's State of the Union address.

Mothers, fathers and loved ones of victims of police violence were invited as guests of the Congressional Black Caucus and the first lady to put pressure on Washington to address the issue of policing.

“It may have been Tyre Nichols yesterday, but it could be any one of us today and tomorrow,” Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., the chairman of the Black Caucus, said of the most recent victim during a news conference Tuesday morning.

A video released earlier this month showed the violent Jan. 7 encounter between Nichols and the Memphis, Tennessee, police officers who savagely beat the 29-year-old Black FedEx worker for three minutes while screaming profanities at him. Nichols was hospitalized and died days later. Five police officers, who also are Black, have been fired and charged with second-degree murder and two more have been disciplined.

Days after the release of the video, Horsford reached out to Nichols' parents, RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, to invite them to the State of the Union address. The Nevada Democrat said it was important that the couple witnessed the president's speech as he laid out the important issues facing Americans.

“Being in the room for the State of the Union is an experience that I hope will give Tyre Nichols’ parents some comfort and, most of all, hope," Horsford said. “They deserve to hear a commitment to real action on ending this national scourge of unnecessary deaths at the hands of law enforcement.”

Also in attendance is the mother of Eric Garner and the brother of George Floyd, among others.

The visible reminder of police brutality comes against the backdrop of reignited negotiations among lawmakers to draft a modest proposal for police reform that could pass in a newly GOP-controlled House.

The talks last Congress focused on writing compromise legislation curbing law enforcement agencies’ use of force and making them more accountable for abuses. But negotiations stalled over Democrats’ demands to make individual police officers accused of abuses liable for civil penalties.

Black Caucus members went to the White House last week for a three-hour meeting with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and left with an agreement on the path forward both legislatively and through executive action.

On Tuesday night, Biden is expected to call on Congress to pass the legislative package, named after Floyd, which passed in the House last session but failed to overcome a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

Meanwhile, advocates have been urging the White House to be more clear about what has historically held up progress on police reform, even when Democrats controlled Congress.

Horsford and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., the two men leading negotiations in each chamber, said that this time around, Democrats cannot go forward on their own, but will need buy-in from Republicans and law enforcement groups to pass lasting, meaningful reform.

___

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Farnoush Amiri, The Associated Press

When elite cops go rogue: So-called "elite" anti-crime units like the one that killed Tyre Nichols have a nationwide legacy of killings, kidnappings, abuse, and corruption. So why do cities keep using them?

Katherine Long,Jack Newsham
Thu, February 9, 2023 


People gather to protest against the police killing of Tyre Nichols at Times Square in New York on January 28, 2023.Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

How elite police units, like the Memphis Scorpion squad that killed Tyre Nichols, commit the crimes they're created to stop

They went by different names.

Red Dog. CRASH. The Gun Trace Task Force. Street Crime Unit. The Special Operations Section. The "Death Squad." The Place-Based Investigations Unit.

Scorpion.

But the specialized "street crime" squads, created in police departments around the country in response to rising rates of homicide and drug- and gun-related crimes, share a pattern of abuse.

The outgrowth of decades of popular policing theories that advocate concentrating attention on high-crime areas, "street crime" squads in practice tend to focus on drugs, guns, or gangs – typically in lower-income neighborhoods with fewer white residents.

Their aggressive tactics are so notorious – and so similar – that in many cities they're known as "jump-out boys" for the way officers spill out of their cars to accost people during stops. In Chicago, such units have contributed to residents seeing the police as "an occupying force" that make some neighborhoods feel like "an open-air prison," the Department of Justice found in 2017.

"They patrol our streets like they are the dog catchers and we are the dogs," one Chicago resident told investigators.

The proliferation of these "street crime" squads is under renewed scrutiny after five members of Memphis's Scorpion unit were charged earlier this year with beating 29-year-old Tyre Nichols to death in what should have been a routine traffic stop.

"What we've seen this month in Memphis and for many years in many places, is that the behavior of these units can morph into 'wolf pack' misconduct," Ben Crump, an attorney for Nichols' family, which is suing the city, wrote in an open letter to the city of Memphis last month. "The 'why' of Tyre Nichols's death is found in this policing culture itself."

Insider's review of nearly two dozen units established to target neighborhoods police viewed as high-crime zones found repeated complaints of abuse, discrimination, criminal violence, and corruption. Oftentimes, these units have been disbanded after egregious incidents, including the use of deadly force, only to be reconstituted months or years later under a different name when they become politically popular again.

Specialized units have been connected to some of the most high-profile and flagrant cases of police brutality of the last 30 years, including the killings of Breonna Taylor, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Eric Garner.

"There are umpteen examples of this turning into a nightmare. These elite units are going off the rails," said Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has written extensively about police militarization.

"It happens so often that you have to conclude this is a flawed model."

A woman leaves a flower during a vigil on the day of the release of a video showing the Memphis police beating of Tyre Nichols.Brian Snyder/Reuters

Tyre Nichols and the Memphis Scorpion unit

On the evening of January 7, members of the Memphis police department stopped Tyre Nichols in the middle of a six-lane road on the outskirts of the city for what they alleged was reckless driving.

It was dark. A group of officers, screaming obscenities, yanked him from his car and forced him to lay on the ground. One member of the unit used pepper spray, hitting Nichols and some of the other officers.

Nichols broke free and ran down a nearby street.

"I hope they stomp his ass," one of the pepper-sprayed officers, who stayed behind at the scene of the stop, is heard saying on body-camera footage.

About eight minutes later, officers found Nichols a half-mile away. Officers shook him, sprayed him with pepper spray, and kicked him in the head, footage released by the city shows. As Nichols staggered, moaning incoherently, some officers held him upright while others punched him in the head.

After several minutes, officers handcuffed Nichols and leaned him against a car. In the roughly 20 minutes before he was loaded into an ambulance, Nichols was mostly silent and motionless.

Nichols, who family members described as a free spirit skateboarder and photographer with his mom's name tattooed on his arm, died three days later. State police investigators said he died from injuries sustained during the "use-of-force incident with officers."

Memphis police officers Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Dean, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin., and Desmond Mills Jr. are now facing murder charges.Memphis Police Department

Memphis launched Scorpion in fall 2021, with four teams of 10 officers each directed to focus on violent crime. Memphis clocked more than 300 murders that year and 290 in 2020, far more than in the years before the pandemic.

Only a few months after forming Scorpion, Mayor Jim Strickland was already boasting that the unit was helping turn the tide.

"Since its inception last October through January 23, 2022, the Scorpion Unit has had a total of 566 arrests — 390 of them felony arrests," he said. "They have seized over $103,000 in cash, 270 vehicles, and 253 weapons."

Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis disbanded the unit in the wake of Nichols' homicide.

The contours of Nichols's death resonate with New Yorkers who recall the era of stop-and-frisk, with Atlantans who remember the heyday of the Red Dog unit, with Baltimore residents scarred by the abuses of the Gun Trace Task Force – and with residents of dozens of other major cities that have established elite, aggressive units dedicated to targeting specific neighborhoods where police believe crime proliferates.
An elite squad's mistakes led to Breonna Taylor's death

Louisville, Kentucky's Place-Based Investigations unit was supposed to help police eliminate some of the most persistent violent crime in the city.

Tasked with going after drugs and guns, the unit, founded in 2019, was disbanded fewer than six months later after a botched police raid killed 26-year-old emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor.

The unit's very first mission was targeting suspected drug dealing on Elliott Avenue, miles from Taylor's home. But the scope of its investigation rapidly broadened to include Taylor, who police erroneously suspected of holding drugs on behalf of her ex-boyfriend.

Plainclothes officers, acting on false information from the Place-Based Investigations Unit, broke into Taylor's home with a battering ram, failing to knock and announce their presence as their warrant required. Inside, Taylor's boyfriend, who later told police he thought an intruder was trying to break in, shot one officer in the thigh. Police opened fire on the couple, killing Taylor.

Later, in a plea agreement, one of the members of the Place-Based Investigations unit would admit that she and other officers based the justification for the warrant to search Taylor's home not on evidence, but on a "gut belief."

Taylor's death helped spur the swell of nationwide protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020.

The story behind the creation of the Place-Based Investigations Unit shows how well-intentioned academic researchers and ties to other police officers can help such squads proliferate around the country, Kraska, the Eastern Kentucky University professor, said.

Investigation of the Chicago Police Department. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office Northern District of Illinois. January 13, 2017United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office Northern District of Illinois

The Louisville department had consulted with Tamara Herold, a former Cincinnati police officer turned University of Nevada Las Vegas criminologist, about a study that seemed to show that focusing an increased police presence on geographic areas with high levels of crime could lead to sustained crime reductions.

Two years after Taylor's death, nine other cities had adopted the model, the Washington Post reported. Herold, who has said Taylor's death was a "horrific tragedy" but is "not a defining feature of this initiative," is still pitching it to police departments.

"Hot-spots policing can be very effective. Cops count. When police are present, we can have a significant deterrent effect," Herold told the Police 1 podcast last month, acknowledging that if done poorly, the model can "strain police-community relationships." Herold did not respond to a request for comment.

Memphis's Scorpion unit emerged a few years after a regional anti-crime group consulted with former New York City Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly on a strategy for tackling gang violence. Kelly is the architect of some of New York's most controversial policing strategies, including the creation of anti-crime units, and is a vocal advocate for stop-and-frisk.

Reports from the private investigations firm K2 Intelligence, where Kelly then worked, recommended Memphis increase staffing levels in specialized units to fight street crime. By 2019, according to the Marshall Project, the city had done so.

The New York Police Department directed officers to aggressively target suspicious activity in neighborhoods they viewed as high-crime areas. Here, officers frisk and arrest men in Harlem in 1995.Jon Naso/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Memphis police chief Davis also has prior experience with special street crime units.

Davis, who took the reins of the Memphis PD in 2021, previously led the force in Durham, North Carolina. Before that, she rose through the ranks in Atlanta, including a stint leading a unit of the so-called Red Dogs, an Atlanta street-crime squad that was disbanded in the face of abuse allegations and lawsuits.
Elite police units are magnets for scandal

Virtually every big city has had an elite unit that's been broken up after leaders concluded that it went too far.

Atlanta public safety commissioner George Napper created the Red Dog unit in 1987, at a time when Atlanta was dealing with a surge in crack cocaine use. Its name comes from a football play, but was later claimed to be an acronym for "Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia." An article in the Atlanta Constitution from its first year describes how the team would descend on reports of drug activity, make arrests, and seize drugs and cash.

"When the squad sweeps an area, anyone moving, especially young, black males, is told to hit the ground, hands behind his head, face down," the newspaper said. "Police officials admit the squad does little to reduce the flow of drugs into the city or the demand for them, but Mr. Napper said even what little the squad can do is important."

Two decades later, though, the concerns about the unit's methods and effectiveness that had been raised from the start came to a head. The unit was abolished in 2011 after a raid on the Eagle, a gay bar, whose patrons and employees filed lawsuits claiming that police illegally detained them and used homophobic slurs while they lay handcuffed on the barroom floor. The city ended up paying more than $1 million in settlements.

Investigation of the Chicago Police Department. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office Northern District of Illinois. January 13, 2017United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office Northern District of Illinois

Decades before Atlanta ended its elite unit operations, Detroit scrapped its "Stress" anti-robbery squad in the 1970s after its members shot dozens of rounds into an apartment where off-duty Wayne County deputies were playing poker, killing two. Chicago disbanded its Special Operations Section in 2007 amid a wide-ranging corruption scandal. Prosecutors ultimately charged 13 of its members with breaking into homes to rob residents and conducting illegal traffic stops to shake down drivers. Eleven pleaded guilty and two went to prison, including one who admitted to ordering a hit on a fellow officer he believed was collaborating with the federal investigation.

The Los Angeles Police Department's robbery-focused Special Investigations Section was embroiled in so many shootouts that it was branded the "death squad." And its CRASH team was broken up in 2000 after a member — who had been caught stealing cocaine from the evidence locker and replacing it with Bisquick pancake mix — flipped on his colleagues in what became known as the Rampart scandal.

More recently, in Baltimore, all eight members of the Gun Trace Task Force were charged in 2017 and convicted of crimes including robbing drug dealers, stealing cash and filing bogus overtime claims. And in 2021, Springfield, Massachusetts responded to a Justice Department report about abuses by its narcotics bureau by shifting the team's focus to firearms.

Police chiefs say elite teams are popular and effective

Many police leaders and criminologists say specialized units do work that other officers can't. Uniformed officers conducting patrols or responding to 911 calls don't have the time or tools to surveil gangs and gather information on the flow of drugs and guns, they say, and it takes dedicated officers to take criminal networks down.

Tyre Nichols's death is far from the only instance where what should have been a routine traffic stop turned violent. In May 2020, Atlanta police threatened college student Messiah Young with a handgun before arresting Young and his passenger. The officers were fired. This photo is a still pulled from body camera footage.Associated Press

The units can also be politically popular. "Police departments say these units are created in response to community demand for specialized policing," said Jorge Camacho, a former New York prosecutor now with Yale Law School.

The Los Angeles Police Department's robbery-focused Special Investigations Section was embroiled in so many shootouts that it was branded the "death squad." And its CRASH team was broken up in 2000 after a member — who had been caught stealing cocaine from the evidence locker and replacing it with Bisquick pancake mix — flipped on his colleagues in what became known as the Rampart scandal.

Meanwhile, police chiefs contend they are essential to fighting crime.

"It works. They make a lot of good cases, a lot of good arrests. Put a lot of bad people away to help solve the issue," Florida's Orange County Sheriff John W. Mina, who previously led the Orlando Police Department, told CNN last year.

Street crime squads are popular among politicians who say only aggressive policing will reduce violent crime. New York Mayor Eric Adams reintroduced the city's controversial street crime units last year. Here, Adams points to a chart of gun violence he said shows his policies are working.Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The popularity of these units among some elected officials, criminologists, and law enforcement can sometimes shield them from scrutiny, allowing abusive practices and corruption to fester. Police leaders had been receiving complaints about the Gun Trace Task Force for years before it was disbanded in 2017, The Baltimore Sun reported, including a 2015 tip from a local reporter that the task force's leader, Wayne Jenkins, was robbing people.

Until his arrest on racketeering charges in 2017, Jenkins was widely considered "a rising talent," the Sun wrote, "with an uncanny knack for delivering the goods."

There's not a clear explanation for why so many elite units go bad. In interviews with Insider, experts suggested that a confluence of mission overreach, militarized training, inadequate supervision, racism, and other factors could be to blame.

Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department. U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. August 10, 2016U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division

A recent report from the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank, castigated U.S. police academies' "paramilitary approach" to training for prompting police officers to view community members "as the enemy."

Geoff Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, said lowering the ratio of officers to supervisors within elite units could begin to address some of their issues.

"When you have these young, aggressive, proactive cops all together, with no controls, what do you think is going to happen?" Alpert said. "These units need more supervision, more control."

Camacho said that part of the problem is that when all police have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

"You have a bunch of officers with a mandate to look at homicide," he said, prompting them to be "hyper-vigilant."

"They view anything as an indicator of violent crime," he added, "and respond accordingly."
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man"

Even after decades of elite units being shut down over abuses, cities have continually found ways to resurrect them. In New York, one notorious police unit has twice been disbanded only to come back from the dead.

The cyclical saga of the Street Crime Unit is a prime example of how even after egregious incidents, such squads are often reconstituted under a different name, even as their mission and tactics remain the same.

Established in 1971, by the late 1990s, the NYPD's Street Crime Unit was "known as the commandos" of the department, "an elite squad of nearly 400 officers," a New York Times reporter wrote in 1999, "dispatched into menacing neighborhoods each night to chase down rapists, muggers and dangerous fugitives, and above all, to get illegal guns off the streets."

They wore t-shirts with a Hemingway quote: "Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."

Former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, shown here leaving a press conference after a federal judge ruled the department's use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional, later consulted on the formation of Memphis's Scorpion squad.Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The unit made up less than 2% of the force but seized 40% of the illegal guns confiscated by the NYPD.

In the late 1990s, the Street Crime Unit tripled in size, amid a panic over a rising number of homicides. Then-mayor Rudy Giuliani preached a "broken windows" policing doctrine that advocated zero tolerance toward even minor offenses.

In a city grappling with violent crime, authorities touted the Street Crime Unit as a bright spot.

"I wish I could bottle their enthusiasm and make everyone take a drink of it," then-NYPD commissioner Howard Safir told the New York Daily News in 1998.

But on February 4, 1999, four members of the Street Crime Unit fired 41 bullets at 23-year-old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo while he was standing in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building, after the officers said he reached into his pocket as if to draw a firearm.

Diallo was unarmed and reaching for his wallet, multiple investigations into his killing later found. The officers were acquitted of criminal charges and temporarily reassigned to desk duty.

The police killing sparked a maelstrom of accusations that the Street Crime Unit's pervasive violence, particularly against poor, Black and brown New Yorkers, had gone ignored for years.

Investigation of the Springfield, Massachusetts Police Department's Narcotics Bureau. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office District of Massachusetts. July 8, 2020United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office District of Massachusetts

Uproar over Diallo's death — and a class-action lawsuit challenging the department's use of stop-and-frisks, which plaintiffs said was a form of illegal racial profiling — forced the NYPD to disband the Street Crime Unit in 2002.

In spirit, though, the Street Crime Unit continued. Many of its officers were absorbed into new plainclothes units, called anti-crime units, that were charged with the same mission of preventing violent crime. And their tactics spread: NYPD officers made more stop-and-frisks in the early 2000s than they had in the 1990s, a second class-action lawsuit, filed in 2008, alleged. The ranks of anti-crime units grew to nearly 600 officers by 2020.

"The problem on a most basic, fundamental level is that the leadership of most departments does not want to deal with the Constitution," New York civil rights attorney Jonathan Moore, who sued the city over stop-and-frisk, told Insider.

The purpose of stopping so many New Yorkers for patdowns was explicitly racial, then-state senator Eric Adams testified in federal court in 2013.

An analysis by The Intercept found that plainclothes officers, including members of the anti-crime units, were responsible for or involved in 31% of police shootings since 2000, despite composing only 2% of the police force.

The anti-crime units were involved in notorious police killings, including the fatal 2018 shooting of Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill man, in Brooklyn; the fatal 2006 shooting of Sean Bell; and, in 2014, the death by suffocation of Eric Garner, whose last words, "I can't breathe," have become an emblem of protests against police brutality.

Amid the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, another police commissioner decided to shut down the units. The NYPD "can move away from brute force," then-commissioner Dermot Shea said at the time.

But less than two years later, now-Mayor Adams brought back the controversial squads, this time rebranded Neighborhood Safety Teams, amid a panic over rising crime rates and a deadly attack in 2022 on two police officers.

A member of Chicago's Special Operations Squad making an arrest in 2005, two years before the unit was broken up amid allegations of corruption.Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis via Getty Images

Adams promised not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But he also said the squads were necessary in order to disrupt "the flow of guns in our cities."

Their early record has not been promising. Most of the arrests made by the Neighborhood Safety Teams have nothing to do with guns, City & State reported. The most frequent type of arrest their officers have made is for possession of a fake ID.
Elite police squads get rebranded after controversies

New York is far from the only place where notorious squads have been disbanded and reformed. The New Haven Police Department dissolved its Street Interdiction Squad in 2007 amid a theft and bribery scandal, then reconstituted it two years later. Miami resurrected its Street Narcotics Unit under a new moniker, but was forced to dissolve it in 2013 under fire from the Department of Justice, which partially blamed it for a spate of police shootings.

Experts say cities that stand up street crimes units risk replacing one kind of violence with another.

Such units bring "a new level of aggression and threat to the community," said Maurice Hobson, a professor at Georgia State University who has written a book about Atlanta's Red Dog unit.

After Atlanta shut the unit down, the city also created a new specialist team to take its place: the APEX unit. (In 2021, the unit was rebranded as the Titan unit.)

"From people in the community, the only change when the APEX unit came out was they changed their uniforms," said Tiffany Roberts, the policy director for the Southern Center for Human Rights.

The death of Tyre Nichols has prompted others to come forward with claims of mistreatment at the hands of the Scorpion unit. Maurice Chalmers-Stokes, 19, told Memphis media that he was thrown into a fence last fall by a group of officers, including one of the cops accused of killing Nichols. He is suing the city, and fighting charges for possessing a stolen gun that police say they found on him in that interaction.

NPR reported that four of the five officers charged in Nichols's death, who had two to six years of experience, had been disciplined by the Memphis police. One of the officers, Demetrius Haley, was disciplined in 2021 for not reporting an incident where a colleague — who resigned — yanked a woman from a car and dislocated her shoulder.

Haley was also named in a 2016 lawsuit filed by a plaintiff who said that Haley was one of the corrections officers who abused him at a Shelby County jail. The case was dismissed.

Moore, who worked on the New York City stop-and-frisk case, said part of the issue with elite units is that some of them are stretched too thin. But he said no matter how many supervisors are on the job, street-crime teams often do what politicians and policymakers want them to do.

"Leadership does not want these officers to have their hands tied," he said. "They want them to go out and be aggressive."

 Business Insider

$31.8M generated by Sask.'s first regulated gambling website in 2 months 'surprisingly high', expert says


Tue, February 7, 2023 

Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority said its site PlayNow.com had 8,015 registered users by the end of December. (Alexander Kirch/Shutterstock - image credit)

A gambling expert is surprised that Saskatchewan's first regulated gambling website generated $31.8 million dollars in its first two months of operation.

The Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority (SIGA) was given exclusive rights to establish the province's first regulated website for online casino games and single-event sports betting, and turned to the British Columbia Lottery Corporation to design PlayNow.com.

PlayNow.com was launched last November.

Garragh McGee, a professor at the University of Bath specializing in sports gambling, said when the gambling market opens and is deregulated, it's typical to see a "prohibition effect".

"But this [$31.8 million] well exceeds what I would expect to see during this honeymoon period," he said.

Timothy Sawa/CBC

The 31.8 million includes bets stemming from winnings — as well as promos, bonuses and free bets provided by the platform.

McGee says the 24/7 access to gambling websites can lead to more people getting addicted. He said gambling addictions are easier to hide than other addictions like alchoholism.

"One of the staggering aspects to gambling harms is the stigma that leads gambling addiction concealed," McGee said on CBC Radio's The Afternoon Edition.

"I often have parents that lost children to gambling related suicide, I only wish they came forward and I only wish they confided in me before it was too late."

What is SIGA doing to reduce gambling harms?

Under a 2021 agreement, half of the revenue generated from the website operated by Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority goes to First Nations communities and the other half goes to the Saskatchewan government.

Ben Whiting, SIGA's iGaming sport and production specialist, says PlayNow.Com is an alternative to offshore gambling websites that don't have our provincial and federal regulatory standards.

PlayNow.com has a health platform which has 24/7 support via live chat or phone call with player health specialists.

"Any of our players are able to reach out and talk to an actual human being about any player health issues that they are facing and they're able to get the help they need," Whiting said on CBC Radio's Blue Sky.

Albert Couillard/Radio-Canada

Whiting says other safeguards include daily time limits on the platform, mandatory weekly deposit limits, time reminders, algorithms that could detect problematic gathering and educational resources

PlayNow.com users can also set voluntary time limits of when they can access the platform and they can't go back on their contracts.

Whiting says the regulatory safeguards and standards set in place so players can't get carried away or feel the adrenaline rush that comes from gambling.

"We make sure that gambling is always healthy and fun and it's not turning into a problem," Whiting said.

Concerns from a recovering compulsive gambler

Gambling wasn't fun for Jim.

CBC has agreed to withhold Jim's last name because Gamblers Anonymous members are encouraged to remain anonymous in the media. Gamblers Anonymous encourages anonymity to protect the reputation of its members in the event of and after a relapse — and its potential to diminish the ways the group has supported others with gambling addictions.

Jim remembers the shame he felt owing the Canadian Revenue Agency around $250,000 because he was using his money to fuel his compulsive gambling addiction instead of paying taxes.

Jim joined Gamblers Anonymous Saskatchewan 25 years ago after a friend informed his wife of his gambling addiction. He hasn't placed a bet since.

Jim is worried about the lack of support for people victimized by the addiction as gambling becomes easier to access online.

"I've seen people lose homes, marriages," Jim said.

"Now you're able to gamble on your phone at home, gamble in the office — this has taken gambling to a whole new element. There's going to be a lot of consequences because of it."

A bombardment of gambling advertisement

Jim says people in his Gambler Anonymous group are disgusted by the number of gambling advertisements since single-event sports betting became legal in Canada in 2021.

"You can't even watch a regular TV show without being bombarded and it's not just the province of Saskatchewan it's from everywhere," Jim said.

"If sites would spend as much money providing help that they spend on advertising I think that would go a long way."

Jim would like to see increased awareness about the dangers of gambling.

"I think they need to start looking at what help they can provide for the lives destroyed, nobody ever talks about the victims, " Jim said. "You've got families out there that have lost their homes, marriages have been destroyed, it's destroyed the children."

"Start putting that on TV and start showing those stories."

What needs to change?

Jim believes the safeguards that online platforms put in place aren't enough for gambling addicts because most are self imposed.

He says that people who are addicted to gambling have to get to a point where they're able to reach out for help.

"We [compulsive gamblers] are so full of shame and guilt that we don't want to tell anybody," Jim said. "We only want to talk about when we win, we never want to talk about when we lose."

McGee says there needs to be more research into gambling addiction that is independent of the industry. He would also like to see more education and treatment services for people suffering from gambling addictions.

"What we tend to see is driving corporate imperatives driving that process rather than public health and that's the major issue I would encourage Canada but also Saskatchewan to consider."

WATCH| The Fifth Estate explores the sudden spike in sports betting options:

If you or someone you know is struggling with problem gambling, you can call the Saskatchewan Problem Gambling Helpline at 1-800-306-6789.

Calgary energy firm backs away from proposed $4B northern Alberta methanol plant

The project was originally announced with a $2-billion cost, but the latest figures showed the price tag had doubled.

Tue, February 7, 2023

An image of a proposed methanol plant near Grande Prairie, Alta. (Nauticol Energy Ltd. - image credit)

Calgary-based Nauticol Energy Ltd. has confirmed it will not be moving forward with a proposed $4-billion net-zero blue methanol plant near Grande Prairie.

The company had planned to build the plant in the County of Grande Prairie, about 10 kilometres south of the city. Announced in 2018, it would have begun operating in 2025.

The plant would have created methanol from natural gas. In 2021, Nauticol announced plans to add carbon-capture technology.

Nauticol president and CEO Mark Tonner said the pandemic created headwinds for the project.

"Some of the headwinds that we encountered were just costing us too much time and money to overcome," Tonner said in an interview with CBC News.

"So these obviously include enduring two years of a global pandemic and the upheaval in the capital markets. There's significantly less appetite for risk and uncertainty compared to when we launched the project.

"And over the last few months, we've been working closely with some of our First Nation partners to review alternative paths."

The methanol project had been supported by the Western Cree Tribal Council.

Smaller plant possible

Tonner said no final decision has been made on the future of the site.

"It is entirely possible that a scaled-down net-zero methanol plant may very well be proceeding on the site," he said.

The project promised up to 5,000 jobs during construction and another 200 highly skilled permanent positions, according to an archived version of Nauticol's website, which has been taken down.

No public funds have been provided to the methanol project, according to a statement from Alberta Energy.

However, the province said the Alberta Petrochemicals Incentive Program (APIP) could have provided hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding after the plant was operational.

"Nauticol Energy had applied through APIP and received advance notification approval, noting their project had been evaluated and met all the eligibility requirements set out by the guidelines," the statement said.

The government said it will "continue to encourage investment and creating jobs" using the petrochemical incentive program.

NDP energy critic Kathleen Ganley said the government should try to save the methanol project.

"All indications were that this was going to create ... renewable energy products and a lot of jobs," Ganley said in an interview.

Tonner said the cost of the methanol plant just kept increasing.

"We had two divergent things happening: less appetite for risk and a higher requirement for granularity," he said.

The project was originally announced with a $2-billion cost, but the latest figures showed the price tag had doubled.

While Nauticol has bowed out, Tonner said there is still opportunity for a scaled-down development. He said a smaller project could also expand in the future.

"Appetite for risk changes, need for energy security changes," he said.

"I believe in Grande Prairie."

Union files bad-faith bargaining complaint against Canada Revenue Agency


Tue, February 7, 2023 

OTTAWA — A union representing federal public servants has filed a bad-faith bargaining complaint against the Canada Revenue Agency.

In December, Treasury Board President Mona Fortier announced that all federal public servants would be returning to the office at least two to three days per week.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada claims the revenue agency's recent decision to impose a "one-size-fits-all" return mandate — instead of negotiating at the bargaining table — amounts to bad faith.

The union and the revenue agency have been in negotiations since last October when they were discussing telework, but at a bargaining meeting in January the agency announced that telework would no longer be part of the talks.

Union president Jennifer Carr says that removing a core issue from the bargaining table is a bad-faith manoeuvre.

The agency has not responded to a request for comment.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 7, 2023.

———

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

The Canadian Press

Disney to Cut 7,000 Jobs and Save $5.5 Billion: What it Means for the Company

Thu, February 9, 2023 at 4:00 a.m. MST

Disney announcing it will cut 7,000 jobs as it looks to slash $5.5 billion worth of costs. The news comes after the media giant beat wall street estimates for its first quarter earnings and revenue.

Here’s what you need to know:

Disney reporting its quarterly earnings results, beating analyst expectations, on both the top and bottom line.

The house of mouse posting earnings of $0.99/share and $23.5 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2023.

This is the first earnings report since Bob Iger made his surprise return as Disney CEO back in November. Iger sharing the company’s plans to cut costs which include reducing the workforce by 7,000 jobs.

He told shareholders he does not “make this decision lightly” and that the changes will put Disney in a better position to weather future disruption.

The Disney chief executive reassuring investors the new strategic organization “will result in a more cost effective, coordinated, and streamlined approach” to running the business.

Disney also reported an expected dip in subscribers on its streaming platform, Disney+, but an improving loss overall in its direct to consumer division.

Another bright spot for Disney was its parks and experiences business which remain strong, growing a whopping 21% as Disney fans continue to flock to its theme parks in droves.

ECOCIDE

Cleaning up Keystone spill to cost $480 million, says TC Energy

Meghan Potkins
Thu, February 9, 2023 

keyston-oil-spill-0209-ph

TC Energy Corp. says cleanup of a massive crude spill from its Keystone Pipeline into a creek in Kansas last December will cost US$480 million.

The Calgary-based company announced Feb. 9 that a third-party analysis into what caused the leak is still underway, but it has been determined that the spill on Dec. 7 occurred because of a combination of factors, including “bending stress” on the pipe and a weld flaw attributed to work completed at a fabrication facility.

The update included a revised figure for the volume of the spill in Washington County, Kansas. The company said 12,937 barrels of crude oil were released in the rupture along Mill Creek; previously TC Energy had estimated 14,000 barrels.

“Although welding inspection and testing were conducted within applicable codes and standards, the weld flaw led to a crack that propagated over time as a result of bending stress fatigue, eventually leading to an instantaneous rupture,” the company said in a release.

“The cause of the bending stress remains under investigation as part of the broader third-party root cause failure analysis.”

The company said a metallurgical analysis identified no issues with the strength or material properties of the pipe or manufactured fitting. “The pipeline was operating within its operational design and within the pipeline design maximum operating pressure,” it said.

The spill, which prompted a nearly month-long shutdown of the critical cross-border pipeline, will cost the company an estimated US$480 million for investigation and remediation work. The company said it was working with insurers to maximize cost recoveries.

Keystone, which carries crude 4,324 kilometres from Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and the U.S. Gulf Coast, was granted a special permit in 2017 enabling it to operate in the U.S. at a higher stress level than is otherwise allowed under federal pipeline regulations.

The special permit process is currently the subject of an independent review launched by the U.S. federal pipeline regulator in response to concerns raised about Keystone’s safety in a 2021 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

“A bad weld from a fabrication facility is troubling – it adds to the list of manufacturing and construction issues that have plagued this pipeline,” Bill Caram, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, a U.S. advocacy group against pipeline hazards, told Reuters.

Land movement likely caused a bad weld to break and bending stress on the pipe, said Caram, adding that Keystone’s permit requires it to mitigate such threats.

Canada does not have a special permitting system for its pipelines crossing inter-provincial or international boundaries. Each Canadian pipeline is certified to a particular maximum operating threshold, according to the Canada Energy Regulator (CER).

TC Energy’s Keystone pipeline may be ‘unsaleable’ this year due to spill, analyst says


TC Energy’s troubles mount as Keystone spill remains unexplained after five days


U.S. pipeline regulator launched review of special permit process following audit of Keystone spills

TC Energy has voluntarily reduced operating pressure across the entire Keystone line since flows resumed at the end of December.

“Our focus continues to be the safe operation of the pipeline system,” the company said. “Additional operational mitigations, such as reduced operating pressure, are in place to support the safe operations of our system while we continue our response and investigation. Our team is progressing a remediation plan, including an analysis of other areas with potentially similar conditions, the use of additional in-line inspections, and further operational mitigations.”

Additional reporting by Reuters

• Email: mpotkins@postmedia.com | Twitter: mpotkins

Fortescue Metals preparing to cut up to 1,000 jobs - The Australian


FILE PHOTO: The logo of Australia's Fortescue Metals Group can be seen on a bulk carrier as it is loaded with iron ore at the coastal town of Port Hedland in Western Australia

Thu, February 9, 2023 

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Fortescue Metals Group is looking to cut up to 1,000 jobs across its back office and clean energy unit as part of a cost-cutting exercise, The Australian reported on Thursday, less than week before Fortescue reports half-yearly results.

The cuts will be across Fortescue Future Industries, a clean energy subsidiary focused on producing hydrogen using renewable energy, and head office functions like finance and IT, the Australian reported, citing unnamed sources.

A spokesperson for the world's No. 4 iron ore miner said any significant changes to the number of its employees require board approval, which has not been received.

"We are always looking for opportunities for continuous business improvement," the spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday.

Fortescue reports results for the six months through December on Feb. 15.

The company is preparing to cut costs despite a more than three-month rally in iron ore prices as traders bid up the metal in anticipation of China's economy reopening from pandemic restrictions.

The Australian reported that job losses at the company's Pilbara region mining operations are likely, although safety staff and production workers would probably be exempt.

Some of the job losses follow the near completion of Fortescue's Iron Bridge project, set to go into production in March, the paper added.

(Reporting by Lewis Jackson; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)

Cheating by students using ChatGPT is already on the rise, surveys suggest

Vishwam Sankaran
Thu, 9 February 2023 


Two new surveys of teachers have revealed how an increasing number of students are already using OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT to cheat in tests and complete their homework assignments.

A recent survey by the online education resource Study.com found more than a quarter of over 200 surveyed K-12 teachers have already caught at least one student cheating using ChatGPT.

The survey of 203 teachers found about 26 per cent of them caught a student cheating using ChatGPT.

In the same survey, however, about two-thirds of the teachers did not believe ChatGPT should be banned in schools.

The AI chatbot gained prominence in December last year for its ability to respond to a range of queries with human-like text output.

People using the AI application have showed the different ways it can be used to answer specific questions or prompts, write essays and cover letters and even crack university exams.

Last month, a professor from Pennsylvania’s Wharton School showed the chatbot can pass the final exam of an MBA programme designed for students.

Another study also found the AI tool passed the US medical licensing exam USMLE – a three-part exam that usually takes students about four years of med school and about two years of clinical rotations to pass.

Researchers found in this study that ChatGPT “performed at or near the passing threshold for all three exams without any specialised training”.

Another Study.com survey of educators last month pointed out that they were split in their perceptions on whether the AI bot would make teaching easier or harder.

In this survey of about 100 educators and 1,000 students, over 70 per cent of college professors expressed concerns about the bot’s use by students for cheating.

About a third of the surveyed educators believed ChatGPT should be banned in schools and universities, while the remaining two-thirds supported students having access to it.

This study also found that nearly 90 per cent of the surveyed students used ChatGPT to help with a homework assignment, while about half of them admitted to using ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz.

These findings have raised concerns among academics that the AI’s use may disrupt academia.

The New York City education department previously noted that it was worried about the negative impacts of the chatbot on student learning, expressing “concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content”.

“There will be scary moments as we move towards AGI-level systems, and significant disruptions, but the upsides can be so amazing that it’s well worth overcoming the great challenges to get there,” OpenAI chief Sam Altman had tweeted.

Student ‘passes university exam’ with ChatGPT bot in 20 minutes

Lucy Skoulding and Athena Stavrou
Wed, 8 February 2023 

Pieter Snepvangers graduated from uni last year but decided to test the AI software to see if in theory it could be used for coursework (The Tab/Pieter Snepvangers/ SWNS)

A graduate used the controversial bot ChatGPT to write a university essay - and it passed.

Pieter Snepvangers graduated from uni last year but decided to test the AI software to see if in theory it could be used for coursework.

He told the the bot to put together a 2,000 word piece on social policy - which it did in 20 minutes.


Pieter then asked a lecturer to mark it and give their assessment - and was stunned when the tutor said they’d have given it a score of 53 - a 2/2.

The lecturer also said they could not be certain it was written by AI software, reports student news site The Tab.

The lecturer did say it was a bit ‘fishy’ with no depth or proper analysis - but said it was reminiscent of work by ‘lazy’ students.

Pieter says he was shocked to find a university lecturer admit students could “cheat their way” to a passing grade.

Since launching three months ago, ChatGPT has concerned schools and universities across the world.

The software allows users to ask any question and receive an AI-generated answer in seconds which mimics the style and syntax of a human response.

Students in America have been banned from using the software in schools and UK universities are “scrambling” to review how they can detect its use.

Pieter said: “I found a fairly prestigious Russell Group university and asked one of its lecturers if I could take his final year social policy assessment to see if ChatGPT could really work.

Pieter told the the bot to put together a 2,000 word piece on social policy - which it did in 20 minutes (The Tab/Pieter Snepvangers/ SWNS)

“I wanted to know what mark I could get and whether or not he’d spot the essay was written by a bot.

“Under the premise of being a third year social policy student completing a 2,000 word essay I got to work.”

Pieter started off by simply asking the software the essay question and requested 2,000 words with references.

However, the software only managed to give back 365 words at first - only 15 percent of the requested number.

The graduate decided to take a different approach and asked the software 10 separate questions all relating to the essay question, and eventually managed to get 3,500 words from the software.

He then went about taking the best paragraphs the software had given, and copied and pasted them in an order that “resembled the structure of an essay”.

He didn’t change or rewrite any of the words, and his essay was complete in 20 minutes.

Pieter asked a lecturer to mark his assessment and was stunned when the tutor said they’d have given it a score of 53 - a 2/2 (The Tab/Pieter Snepvangers/ SWNS)

He said: “All in all, 20 minutes to produce an essay which is supposed to demonstrate 12 weeks of learning.

‘’Not bad. I nervously sent it off to my lecturer and awaited the verdict.”

Once marked, Pieter was shocked to find that although the software hadn’t delivered a top notch grade, it had still achieved a passing 2:2.

When asked whether it was obvious the piece was written by a robot, the lecturer didn’t “think it would have been abundantly clear,” but said it was a it “fishy.”

His feedback continued: “Basically this essay isn’t referenced. It is very general. It doesn’t go into detail about anything. It’s not very theoretical or conceptually advanced.

“This could be a student who has attended classes and has engaged with the topic of the unit. The content of the essay, this could be somebody that’s been in my classes. It wasn’t the most terrible in terms of content.”

He added: ““You definitely can’t cheat your way to a first class degree, but you can cheat your way to a 2:2.”

The lecturer went on to describe the language as “good proper language” and said he could have been convinced it was written by a “lazy” student who hadn’t put too much work in and was “waffling”.

The only element that ChatGPT completely failed on was a lack on in-text referencing, however the lecturer said if a student “had sneaked some in which seemed plausible”, the essay would be given a mark of 53.

They also said that if Pieter had simply added references from the module’s reading list, he “might even have hit high 50s”.

The lecturer even admitted that out of the essays he had marked so far, a shocking 12 per cent of them show signs of being written using AI software.

Pieter said: “The truth is the software doesn’t give you the answer in one go. You will have to structure its responses in a more coherent order.

“But I spent 10 minutes doing this and got a 53, it wouldn’t have taken much longer to add a few references from the reading list and bump it to a high 2:2.

“ChatGPT is only three months old. You wouldn’t bet against it being able to write an essay worthy of a 2:1 in another three months.”

Pieter graduated from the University of Bristol with a 2:1 in Politics and Social Policy. He lives in London working as a writer.