Month: March 2023

MINNEAPOLIS — The city of Minneapolis agreed on Friday to make sweeping changes in policing, including a pledge to rein in the use of force and discontinue the practice of using the smell of marijuana as a pretext to search people.

The promised changes are part of a legal settlement between the city and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which found in a report last year that the Minneapolis Police Department had routinely engaged in racially discriminatory practices and failed to punish officers for misconduct.

State and city officials called Friday’s agreement a milestone in the quest to change the culture of the police force that sparked a national reckoning over systemic racism in law enforcement after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020.

“I feel optimistic,” Mayor Jacob Frey said at a news conference on Friday. “The agreement isn’t change in and of itself, but it charts a clear road map.”

The accord is the first of what are expected to be two government-mandated plans for comprehensively overhauling policing in the city. The Justice Department is conducting a separate civil rights investigation that city officials expect to yield a consent decree.

The state investigation, started in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death, painted a damning portrait of the Police Department.

Investigators found that Black people in Minneapolis were far more likely to be arrested, searched and stopped than white people. A review of more than 700 hours of body camera footage revealed that officers often used slurs to demean women and Black people, a practice so pervasive that it often imperiled prosecutions.

Chief Brian O’Hara, who took the helm of the embattled police force in November, said that his department acknowledged the need for transformational change.

“We recognize that some terrible things have happened here in the past,” Chief O’Hara, a former senior law enforcement official and deputy mayor of Newark, told reporters on Friday. “We will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that the culture of policing in this town, as well as the narrative around policing and public safety, continues to change.”

Officials said the city’s agreement with the state included some provisions that the department had already adopted as policy, and others that were new.

Notable new requirements include a clear mandate that officers who witness colleagues committing abuses must intervene and report the misconduct. Another would prohibit officers from “using language to taunt or denigrate an individual, including using racist or otherwise derogatory language.” And the agreement precludes officers from relying on the smell of marijuana as a legal pretext to stop and search individuals.

Officers will also be barred from directing that people who are severely agitated be sedated. The tactic came under scrutiny after Mr. Floyd’s killing.

Rebecca Lucero, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, called the agreement “a powerful tool for change,” with strong enforcement mechanisms.

The state and city plan to submit the 144-page agreement to a state court that will be responsible for monitoring compliance. State and city officials will also appoint an independent team to evaluate how effectively the agreement is being carried out and issue regular public reports.

“This is different than anything the city has ever done to strengthen public safety,” Ms. Lucero said. “The city cannot walk away from this agreement; it is only the court that can and will end this agreement, after the city reaches full, effective and sustained compliance.”

State and city officials said they had consulted widely with police officers and city residents before drafting the agreement, which the Minneapolis City Council approved unanimously during a brief session on Friday morning.

It was hard to gauge the extent to which rank-and-file officers embraced the mandate for comprehensive change. The president of the Minneapolis police union did not respond to a request for an interview on Friday.

Chief O’Hara said that since the killing of Mr. Floyd, the Police Department had grappled with an exodus of officers and a flurry of new rules and oversight that has left officers confused and overwhelmed.

“Our cops have been through so much already,” he said in an interview. “I think what they’re looking for is support and direction on what we need to do going forward.”

Putting the new agreement into practice will require an extensive retraining of officers, as well as upgrades in information technology that city officials said would cost tens of millions of dollars.

A formidable challenge to transforming the city’s Police Department is the need to bolster its depleted ranks.

Before Mr. Floyd was killed, Minneapolis had roughly 910 sworn officers. Since then, a sharp rise in resignations and retirements has reduced the total to 593 officers as of early March, well below the 731 officers required by the City Charter.

Chief O’Hara said the city hoped to recruit a new generation of officers, but that it was struggling to attract recruits to a department with a tarnished reputation at a time when unemployment is low and the competition for talent is fierce.

“Policing in general has a problem with perception, but I think it’s nowhere more pronounced than in Minneapolis,” the chief said. “We need to fight against that as we reform.”

Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney in Minneapolis, called Friday’s agreement a step in the right direction. But she said that profound change would take generations and require sustained commitment from all stakeholders.

“There is a long road ahead of us, because so much damage has been done over the years,” said Ms. Armstrong, who served as a co-chair of a working group that advised Mayor Frey on public safety. “There is a significant lack of trust between the public, primarily communities of color, and the city and the Minneapolis Police Department, and a consent decree itself is not going to repair that harm.”

Republican officials almost unanimously rallied around Donald J. Trump after his indictment, but the actual G.O.P. voters who will render a verdict on his political future next year weren’t nearly as solidly behind him.

Some previous Trump voters said the indictment, the first ever of a former president, was the latest shattering of norms in a ledger already stuffed with chaos from the Trump years, and it was time for their party to move on in seeking a 2024 nominee.

In Hawthorne, N.Y., Scott Gray, a land surveyor who voted for Mr. Trump in two elections, said he had wearied of him.

“I think he did a lot of things right,” Mr. Gray said, then immediately darted in the other direction: “I think he’s completely unpresidential. I can’t believe he’s still running for office.”

As an alternative, Mr. Gray said he was interested in “that guy down in Florida who’s governor — DeSantis.” (Ron DeSantis, who is expected to run but has not yet announced a campaign, is Mr. Trump’s closest rival for the G.O.P. nomination in recent polling of primary voters.)

In conversations with Republican-leaning voters around the country, Mr. Trump’s indictment brought out much anger, occasional embarrassment and a swirl of contradictory reactions, not unlike every other twist in the yearslong high drama of Donald Trump.

As expected, many rallied around the former president, calling the indictment by a Democratic prosecutor in New York a sham — a provocation they said would only cement their allegiance to Mr. Trump, who for years has encouraged supporters to see attacks on him as also attacks on them.

But for some the rush to defend was weighed down by scandal fatigue and a sense that Mr. Trump’s time has passed.

Outside Wild Cherry Nail and Hair Studio in Port Richey, Fla., on Friday, Ilyse Internicola and Meghan Seltman, both Trump supporters, discussed the indictment during a smoke break.

“How far are they going to go?” Ms. Internicola, a hair stylist in the salon, demanded.

Ms. Seltman, a manicurist, said she would “always stay loyal” to Mr. Trump. “But for the presidency, I’d like to see DeSantis have his chance,” she said. “He’s done well with Florida, and I’d like to see what he does with the nation. Get it back to how it used to be.”

Mr. Trump was charged by a grand jury on Thursday with more than two dozen counts, with an arraignment expected on Tuesday, when specific charges will be unsealed.

Polling has shown a marked shift toward Mr. Trump among Republicans in recent months, primarily at Mr. DeSantis’s expense, which may partly reflect the highly anticipated indictment, on charges stemming from a $130,000 payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election. Nearly two weeks ago, Mr. Trump incorrectly predicted the day of his arrest and called for protests, seeking to energize supporters. His provocations have included posting a picture of himself wielding a baseball bat beside a picture of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg.

William Stelling, a real estate agent in Jacksonville, Fla., once kept his options open about the 2024 Republican primary. But the indictment goaded him to stand up for the former president.

“I am dusting off my Trump flags and hanging them proudly,” Mr. Stelling said. “This proves to me that he’s the right candidate. Because they’re throwing the kitchen sink at him on a trumped-up charge that we all know is basically a misdemeanor at best.”

Debbie Dooley, a staunch Trump loyalist who helped found the Atlanta Tea Party, went so far as to organize a demonstration for Mr. Trump during a DeSantis visit to suburban Atlanta on Thursday. She said the indictment bolstered her faith that he would win the presidency in his third campaign.

“I’m going to go ahead and make reservations for a hotel in D.C. for the inauguration because Trump is going to be the next president of the United States,” she said. “The prosecutor’s not doing anything but helping him.”

And Allan Terry, a Trump supporter in Charleston, S.C., who has Trump flags flying in his front and back yard, plans to add a new one to his truck, he said.

“If he messed around, so what?” Mr. Terry said of the payment to the former porn star, Stormy Daniels, which prosecutors say underlies violations of campaign finance and business records laws. “It’s immoral. It’s wrong. He shouldn’t have done it. If he did, so what does that have to do with his presidency?”

But not all previous Trump backers share such loyalty. In a Quinnipiac University poll released this week before the indictment, one in four Republicans and one in three independents said criminal charges should disqualify Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate.

A Fox News poll of the potential Republican field this week showed Mr. Trump with 54 percent of support from primary voters, followed by Mr. DeSantis at 24 percent and others, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador and South Carolina governor, in single digits.

In Iowa, which will hold the first Republican nominating contest early next year, Gypsy Russ, who lives in Iowa City, said she once supported Mr. Trump but doubted he could win the party’s embrace yet again.

“There’s not enough Republicans supporting him,” she said.

Ms. Russ said Mr. Trump had shown over and over that he is not presidential. “He’s just very rude,” she said. “And he doesn’t talk like a president is supposed to.” Although he has many fans, including her parents, she added, “He didn’t gain any more followers because of the way he carries himself.”

Jim Alden, a Republican businessman from Franconia, N.H., who is no particular fan of Mr. Trump’s, nonetheless predicted that the indictment would strengthen his support because Republicans find the behavior underlying the charges to be inconsequential, and they believe politics were driving Mr. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in his inquiry.

“Unfortunately, it will embolden Trump’s core supporters because he has cultivated this persecution complex, and being indicted on what may be a questionably strong case is only going to strengthen the persecution complex,” said Mr. Alden.

One of those core supporters was Keith Marcus, who owns a wholesale beauty supply business in New York City.

“I’m shocked and I’m upset,” he said. The indictment “is setting a really bad precedent for the future,” he added. “It’s just a witch hunt. The D.A. is a joke — a total joke.”

But the indictment also seemed to have shaken at least some Trump voters’ willingness to back him in a bid for another four years in the White House.

In Hawthorne, N.Y., a red island of Republican voters in the otherwise liberal northern suburbs of New York, Palmy Vocaturo said he twice voted for Mr. Trump, but his confidence in him has eroded in light of the criminal investigations, not just in Manhattan but in cases pursued by a Georgia prosecutor and a special counsel for the Justice Department.

“I’m getting mixed feelings,” said Mr. Vocaturo, a retired construction worker. “If he is as bad as I think he is, go ahead and do something,” he said of the indictment.

Jon Hurdle, Elisabeth Parker and Haley Johnson contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON — Freeing any American who has been imprisoned in Russia is a daunting challenge, but the espionage charge leveled against a Wall Street Journal reporter detained there this week will make efforts to secure his release particularly difficult.

The Russian authorities have accused the reporter, Evan Gershkovich, of trying to gain illicit information about the country’s “military-industrial complex.” In the Kremlin’s eyes, experts say, that puts him in a special category of prisoners — one quite different from that of two Americans whom Russia has released since the start of the war in Ukraine.

Both of those Americans, the W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner and the former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed, were being held on standard criminal offenses — Ms. Griner on drug charges, Mr. Reed on charges of assaulting police officers — when the Biden administration negotiated their releases, trading them for Russians who were serving criminal sentences of their own in American prisons.

“Let him go,” President Biden told reporters on Friday when asked what his message about Mr. Gershkovich was for the Kremlin.

But the allegations against Mr. Gershkovich, which he denied in a court appearance on Thursday and which his employer adamantly rejects, could signal a higher Kremlin asking price than in those earlier cases.

That is the lesson to date in the case of yet another American accused of spying and imprisoned by Russia, Paul Whelan. The corporate security executive and former Marine was arrested at a Moscow hotel in December 2018, charged with espionage, and given a 16-year prison sentence. Mr. Whelan has denied the charges against him, and U.S. officials insist that he was not conducting espionage — a claim supported by intelligence experts who do not find the notion credible.

People familiar with Mr. Whelan’s case say that Russia has insisted on what would amount to a fair trade if the charges against him were legitimate — a spy for a spy, in other words. Russia officials “continue to insist on sham charges of espionage,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in December, “and are treating Paul’s case differently.”

That helps explain why Mr. Whelan has remained in a bleak Russian prison months after Mr. Reed and Ms. Griner returned home. The United States is not known to be detaining a Russian spy, and even if it were, the Biden administration would be reluctant to make a purported spy trade that lent credibility to false Kremlin allegations of espionage.

U.S. officials say Russia has demanded to trade Mr. Whelan for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany for murdering a Chechen fighter in a Berlin park. The United States says it cannot make a bargain involving a prisoner held in Germany.

Clear signs have already emerged that the Kremlin was motivated by a potential spy swap. Pro-Russia commentators started speculating about the possibility almost immediately, even as they posited that Mr. Gershkovich would first need to be tried and sentenced.

Speaking on a state television talk show Thursday, one commentator, Igor Korotchenko, said the Biden administration needed to “accept the situation” and “work on thinking through possible trades that could happen after this U.S. citizen gets his sentence.”

Daniel Hoffman, a former C.I.A. operative who was stationed in Moscow for five years, called the arrest a cynical ploy by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“Putin essentially takes American citizens hostage because he wants to use them as leverage,” Mr. Hoffman said. “The charges he brings are just going to reflect how he sees the endgame. So if he brings espionage charges, he’s going to want to get one of his own spies back.”

Mr. Hoffman said Mr. Putin could be seeking the release of Sergey Cherkasov, a man who U.S. officials say is a Russian undercover operative who posed as a Brazilian student to study in the United States before getting a job at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Mr. Cherkasov was deported last April from the Netherlands to Brazil, where he was arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But it was only last week that the U.S. Justice Department charged Mr. Cherkasov as a Russian intelligence agent, leading Mr. Hoffman and others to think Mr. Putin might have been motivated to respond.

Several accused Russian agents have been arrested by Western nations in recent months, including six people detained by Polish authorities in mid-March and accused of planning sabotage operations, and a couple sentenced to prison by a Swedish court in January for a decade of spying for Moscow. But U.S. officials have said that, as in the case of Mr. Krasikov, they cannot instruct allies to release prisoners for America’s benefit.

For the Kremlin, the arrest of Mr. Gershkovich serves other purposes. It is also a chance to show that Russia is prepared to take ever more drastic steps in confronting what Mr. Putin frequently refers to as “Western hegemony.”

At the same time, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has used the case to press its narrative of Western subversion. An evening news broadcast on state television referred to Mr. Gershkovich as “the wolf of Wall Street,” and asserted that he had been spreading “anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian propaganda” in his articles.

Just days before Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest, he wrote an article on the toll that Western sanctions against Russia have begun to take on the country’s economy.

“This is a dark day for journalism and for information about what’s happening in Russia,” said Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official for Russia matters in the Trump White House.

Mr. Gershkovich would face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Acquittals in espionage cases in Russia are virtually unheard-of.

If recent precedent is a guide, he is likely to spend more than a year in a high-security prison in almost complete isolation awaiting the end of a lengthy investigation and trial, according to two Russian lawyers who have worked on similar cases.

A Moscow court on Thursday ordered Mr. Gershkovich jailed until May 29. But according to Ivan Pavlov, a Russian lawyer who has defended Russian clients in espionage and treason cases, the proceedings might take up to two years.

During that time, details of the case will most likely be shrouded from the public, he said.

Russia’s state media reported that after he was detained in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains, Mr. Gershkovich was transferred to Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison, once used by the K.G.B. to hold Soviet dissidents.

Ms. Griner was freed in December in a trade for the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a U.S. federal prison sentence for aiding terrorists. Mr. Reed was traded last April for a Russian pilot convicted of drug smuggling charges. U.S. officials have reported no recent progress in their efforts to win Mr. Whelan’s freedom.

On Thursday, a Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, said it was too soon to discuss a swap for Mr. Gershkovich. According to the Russian news agency Interfax, he noted that recent exchanges had occurred only after the accused had been convicted.

ROLLING FORK, Miss. — President Biden vowed on Friday that the federal government would help Mississippi recover and rebuild from devastation caused by a deadly tornado that ripped through rural parts of the state last week.

The storm left at least 26 people dead and injured dozens in Rolling Fork, a town of about 2,000, and across a wide swath of the Mississippi Delta, leaving the struggling region grasping for help to respond on behalf of those affected.

“This is tough stuff,” Mr. Biden said after arriving in his motorcade, which drove past home after home that had been reduced to piles of lumber and twisted metal.

“The thing that really always amazes me, in all the tornadoes I’ve been to of late, is that you have one house standing and one house, from here to the wall, totally destroyed,” he said. “It’s but for the grace of God.”

Mr. Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, met privately with families affected by the storms at South Delta Elementary School, which had parts of its roof ripped off and trees toppled.

Afterward, the couple walked through streets damaged by the tornado, stopping briefly to speak with residents whose homes were torn to shreds by the high winds.

As he toured the wreckage, Mr. Biden saw a devastated town with many homes half standing and roofs torn away. Power lines remained on the ground. Blue plastic tarpaulins covered the roofs of houses that still had walls to attach to. A couch cushion hung on the branches of a tree.

On one overturned truck, one member of the town strung an American flag.

“I’ve been to too many sites like this over the last two years around the country,” Mr. Biden told a small group of people who had gathered for his short speech. “And I always see the same thing in America. When the neighborhood’s in trouble, the whole neighborhood comes to help.”

The president talked with one family whose roof had been sheared off. Farther down the road, workers had created huge piles of debris, part of the process of clearing out the area.

After the brief walk, Mr. Biden spoke for about 10 minutes, saying his administration would stay with residents for as long as it took to help those affected by the storm.

“We’re not just here for today,” he said. “I’m determined, and we’re going to leave nothing behind. We’re going to get it done for you. That’s why I’m here.”

During his remarks, Mr. Biden stood in front of a heap of twisted blue metal and wood that had once been an animal shelter and an auto-parts store. Trees behind him were stripped of their branches, making the area look even more desolate.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Biden received a briefing on the tornado and its damage from federal emergency management officials and local politicians, who described the horror of the storm, which tore through the state for more than an hour.

Throughout the day, Mr. Biden was accompanied by Tate Reeves, the state’s Republican governor, who had repeatedly clashed with the president over Covid-19 restrictions.

Mr. Biden had called out the governor for failing to implement what he called common-sense health restrictions, while Mr. Reeves labeled the president’s coronavirus policies “tyrannical” in a war of words that went back and forth for days.

That ill will was nowhere to be found on Friday, as Mr. Reeves warmly welcomed Mr. Biden — and the help of the federal government — to his beleaguered state.

“I appreciate the fact that the president of the United States is standing here in Sharkey County, Miss., to deliver more remarks today, to hear from the people most affected, and most importantly, as he and Dr. Biden have done throughout the day, show compassion for those who have been most affected,” Mr. Reeves said as he introduced Mr. Biden.

“So without further ado,” he said, “please give a warm Mississippi welcome to the president of the United States.”