Monthly Archives: July, 2015

by Terry Parris Jr.

Some of the best #MuckReads we read this week. Want to receive these by email?  Sign up to get this briefing delivered to your inbox every weekend.

High-speed police chases have killed thousands of innocent bystanders (USA Today)

High-speed police chases have killed thousands of innocent bystanders http://t.co/djWpaPBNSM

— MariaTFowler (@MariaTFowler) July 30, 2015

"Police chases have killed nearly as many people as justifiable police shootings, according to government figures, which are widely thought to under count fatal shootings. Yet chases have escaped the national attention paid to other potentially lethal police tactics."

A dream undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act (The New York Times)

You got to read all of @jimrutenberg on voting rights. Groundbreaking stuff on legal&political backstory http://t.co/7UPi5K2YhD

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) July 30, 2015

"'After a black president had won two elections, five justices arrogantly said they knew more than the evidence considered by 98 senators,' he said. 'Then on June 25 — a day that will go down in political infamy — they voted to gut Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, and thereby nullified preclearance under Section 5 — which meant, on June 26, 2013, we had less voting rights than they had on August 6, 1965.'"

How a little known agency mishandled several billion dollars of stimulus money trying to expand broadband coverage to rural communities (POLITICO)

Sen. Heller, at spectrum hearing, raises my story on a failed fed rural broadband program. Calls RUS a "disaster" http://t.co/D1UUg3RzY3

— Tony Romm (@TonyRomm) July 29, 2015

"More than 40 of the projects RUS initially approved never got started at all, raising questions about how RUS screened its applicants and made its decisions in the first place. But a bigger, more critical deadline looms for those broadband projects still underway: If these networks do not draw all their cash by the end of September, they will have to forfeit what remains. In other words, they may altogether squander as much as $277 million in still-untapped federal funds, which can't be spent elsewhere in other neglected rural communities."

Unlocked: The understaffing of juvenile hall (Youth Radio)

Great #muckreads by @youthradio on the worsening conditions & rising costs at Alameda County Juvenile Hall https://t.co/pVsx3B7NVI

— Joanna Lin (@joannalin) July 30, 2015

"According to county records obtained by Youth Radio -- guards at Alameda County's Juvenile Hall used pepper spray 147 times last year. Ninety percent of state-run juvenile correctional agencies don't allow guards to carry pepper spray at all. But here, with guards working an average of 30 hours of overtime per week, there has been an increase in the use of force on juvenile inmates -- like guards performing take-downs or handcuffing detainees. The department calls these acts "use of physical and mechanical restraints," and that number has nearly tripled in the last five years."

A three-part investigation.