As tenants came together over the last month to demand their rights, I saw a lot of people in power immediately jump to the conclusion that the tenants' union wasn't a real expression of the tenants' will, but some tool by which outside white people coerced Hartford people... Some thoughts: First, I was in some of the tenant union meetings (mostly helping out with Spanish interpretation) and I observed the group dynamics. If the Black and brown folks who make up the membership of that union were being coerced or manipulated, it was way too subtle...

How does TSA pre-check make any sense from a security perspective? We start from the premise that *anyone* could be the person who fills a water bottle with explosive liquid or builds a bomb into their laptop - or shoe! - but if they pay $80, then they definitely won't do that? I maintain that pre-check is bad and elitist, even though it's cheap. When you make basic services have an extra cost and require users to opt in, the result is always to exclude users with fewer resources...

Here is an opinion piece about assaults against transit workers. It says the assaults are increasing and implies this is because homeless people are doing them and they have more access to buses because fares are free. But there is literally NO DATA... ctmirror.org/2023/02/26/ct-… That is not to say that assaults on transit workers shouldn't worry us. They should! But this piece draws a lot of conclusions about the gravity of the problem and its causes with no factual support...

Saw Avatar 2 with the 15-year-old. It was pretty, but imagine having a bazillion dollars to make your epic political statement movie and your politics haven't gained any nuance since you were a high school sophomore. That's this movie. It's like, you invent a whole planet with fantastical landscapes and ten-foot-tall people, but basically it's just, "What if all the naive bullshit ill-informed white people believe about native people were just 100% true?"

Many years ago I wrote an article that was, in part, about how most of the SCOTUS case law that has curtailed the 4th Amendment is fundamentally based on judges' instinctive sense that inherent Black criminality is a real thing and worthy of great caution. Now, ... having recently read some SCOTUS caselaw on prosecutorial immunity, it becomes clear (unsurprisingly) that the same irrational fear underlies jurisprudence there. There is almost no SCOTUS caselaw on child welfare law, but the state appellate law I have read - which is a lot -

My client on appeal, a mom of four, had been struggling to extract herself from a coercive relationship with an older man while her children were removed by the state child welfare agency. She obtained a voucher for housing appropriate to the size of her family. BUT... the supportive housing rules say you can't apply based on kids who are in DCF care - you have to get them back first and then apply. But DCF and the juvenile court take the position that your kids can't be reunified until you have appropriate housing. Luckily, the application...

They should not prosecute a crime committed by a first-grader. This is not actually a difficult question.

https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1612886423035645968

I wouldn't even say, conclusively, that they should prosecute his parents. I would say that they need to see what is happening at home. But potentially removing this child from his parents, without knowing more, won't necessarily improve the situation.

OK, let me tell you a story. A child is born and both the mother and the baby test positive for cocaine. So DCF removes the child from the hospital. Eventually, the child is returned to both parents under a period of agency supervision. 1/27 2. Part of the supervision is that the mother has to take drug tests. When some of her tests come back positive, DCF tells the parents, "You have to live apart and the child has to live with the father. The mother can't have unsupervised contact." The family immediately complies.

In case it wasn't clear, this anti-trans CPS policy in Texas is targeted, state-sanctioned terrorism, and it absolutely doesn't matter if a court won't ultimately sustain a neglect petition. The thing to understand is that...

https://twitter.com/jdavidgoodman/status/1498710608958611460

When the child welfare agency comes into a family's life, the trauma is immediate. It's like an arrest: there is little solace in the distant promise of judicial exoneration, because your life is getting turned upside-down RIGHT NOW. And for parents, the double emotional blow of

Yesterday I realized what it is that has been gently eating away at me about so many of the child protection trials I've been doing lately, and it is this: Many participants in the system seem to have forgotten, along the way, that what they are doing is taking away a fundamental right that most people who have confronted this process value more than their physical liberty: the right to to raise their children.

My health plan lets me go directly to specialists, but it's harder to get an appointment. So I never know whether to go through my primary care doctor so he can say, "See a specialist," or just book the specialist. My eyelid on one eye is slightly swollen as if I had a little mosquito bite, and my vision in that eye is blurry. Am I going blind or will the radioactive superpowers kick in shortly?

Good morning. Would you like to see the most disingenuous conceivable op-ed on juvenile justice policy? You are in luck. Here it is, and I would like to break it down a little bit... ctinsider.com/news/article/O… Since Connecticut joined 48 (!) other states in raising the age of juvenile delinquency jurisdiction to 18 in 2007, prosecutors and Republicans have been decrying the inevitable rise of out-of-control, unaccountable children who will terrorize the God-fearing people of the state.

Happening now: town hall on Hartford's Civilian Crisis Response Team: fb.watch/32OxzgAG0j/ I am, on the one hand, excited that Hartford is working on this. On the other hand, if the basic problem is that police are often called on to do something they are ill-suited to, because they have guns and not adequate training...

What do we do these days when something is confusing? We tweet through it. That's what I'm going to do with Christopher Nolan's tine travbel thriller "Tenet," which I watched last night. I will tell you EVERYTHING and see if I can sort it out. Spoiler alerts, obviously. 1/∞ The movie starts with people filing into a concert venue for a classical music concert, and the orchestra is making that tuning up sound, which, weirdly, never coalesces into a single note, which I found annoying because I love that part.

I want white folks in Connecticut suburbs to make a New Year's resolution: recognize that if you live in a municipality that gets its core services (governance, hospitals, social services) from a nearby city, you are benefiting from a system of economic and racial segregation... It does not matter that you didn't build it. It does not matter that you felt your only choices were the "good" (mostly white) segregated schools or the "bad" (mostly Black and Latinx) segregated schools. You are on the happy end of a system built to maintain that divide.

When I wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, there was a pretty extensive fact-checking process (shout out to @jdesmondharris). Apparently, that is not the case at the Wall Street Journal, at least when a piece advances a highly partisan, fundamentally racist view... So let's dig into just how wrong Bob Stefanowski's screed against Hartford is. To be clear, Hartford has a lot of problems! But Stefanowski diagnoses them all exactly backwards. He is consistently and astonishingly wrong...

Man, I remember a certain era when my friends who came to NY for college but weren't from there always wanted to go to some expensive-ass restaurant NYE parties and I, a Brooklyn boy, just wanted to bounce from house party to house party and drink in the street. It has been a long time since I had that kind of NYE (because kids) but I could really go for that about now. Maybe next year.

It has been a full, challenging year - not as much for me as for many, thanks to good health and steady employment - but still: new baby (Sept. '19), new job (City Council), and back surgery kept it interesting. So I want to pat myself on the back for making a lot of music (🧵): Early in the year, while recovering from surgery, I recorded a bunch of songs I was making up for the baby. This one is about her and me both being immobile and in bed:
soundcloud.app.goo.gl/mWct8

The other day, @constanz_a was pointing out how much room this story makes for this guy's humanity and how little it makes for the humanity of the people who bought the guns: I mean, here's how the dude is described and referred to:

With COVID spiking, our president is on a run of unmasked rallies; already overpoliced, our cities are responding to a rash of shootings with... more cops. More than ever, the US is like a couple that tries to solve incessant fighting by getting married. So let's read Vows! Look, I do not want to underestimate to weight of everyone's lived experience, but 210,000 people dead from a respiratory illness might win here.

The mayor used a series of examples to make the case that we need higher bonds for people charged with gun crimes. But argument by anecdote can be deceptive:

https://twitter.com/MayorBronin/status/1317616751761330177

The mayor recited (I think) six instances (maybe eight?) of people who were arrested on gun charges, released fairly quickly, and went on to be arrested for new serious charges soon after. If that were the whole universe of gun arrests, his would be a compelling argument.