Americana

Two killings of Black homeless men highlight Democrats’ post-2020 divide

THE NEWS

The young Marine veteran who killed Jordan Neely will be charged with second-degree manslaughter today, nearly two weeks after putting the homeless subway performer who was reportedly shouting on a train in a deadly chokehold.

A few days earlier, San Francisco supervisors urged the city’s district attorney to release video evidence in the killing of Banko Brown, a homeless man shot by a security guard while allegedly shoplifting from a Walgreens.

DAVID’S VIEW

The response to both killings, from Democrats leading overwhelmingly Democratic cities, was conflicted — and a study in how the party changed in the three years since the murder of George Floyd inspired a massive protest movement for criminal justice reform.

“Two things can be true,” said California state Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco. “People are definitely frustrated with property crime and some of the conditions on our streets. And people don’t want to see other people get shot.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams, whose initial reaction to Neely’s killing infuriated progressive activists by not condemning his killer, used a speech on Thursday to repeat that mentally ill people who posed a danger to themselves should be involuntarily confined, a position opposed by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“If physicians… find that the person has a mental illness, and is dangerous to themselves or others, they have the authority to admit that person and retain them for treatment, even if the person does not agree to it,” Adams said from city hall.

That response, said the NYCLU, “only fuels stigma against homeless New Yorkers and those living with mental illness.”

In San Francisco, activists and left-leaning Democrats have condemned DA Brooke Jenkins for her handling of the Brown case — the killing of a Black trans man who had tried and failed to get supportive housing.

Jenkins, appointed by Mayor London Breed after voters recalled reform DA Chesa Boudin, initially said that the security guard who shot Brown “believed he was in mortal danger and acted in self-defense.” Brown’s advocates say those words could matter even if a case is eventually brought against the guard, possibly prejudicing a jury.

“You can be a defense attorney with one brain cell, and you can blow up that statement from the district attorney,” supervisor Dean Preston said at the board’s public meeting this week, before the vote to urge the video’s release.

Adams and Jenkins were put in office by Democratic voters frustrated about crime and worried that liberal reformers were making it worse — Adams in a crowded mayoral primary, Jenkins after the Boudin recall. (She won re-election in her own right last November.) Adams defeated a more left-leaning field while talking about a return to police tactics that civil libertarians had sued over; Jenkins won after saying that her city was tired of being “made fun of in the news across the country, because of the crime situation.”

Conservatives drove that backlash, too, and right wing media has been all over the Neely story, with many commentators noting the dozens of times he had been arrested. Some have portrayed his attacker, Daniel Penny, as a hero — much like the vigilante Bernard Goetz, who became a polarizing household name after he shot four Black teenagers on a subway in 1984.

But they’ve also been a little slow to see that the movement that filled the streets in 2020 and that Republicans still criticize daily has lost ground and numbers, as elected Democrats got more nervous about rising crime rates and collapsing ridership on public transit. The protests over Neely’s killing and Brown’s killing have been small, relative to what cities saw after prior high-profile deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police or civilians.

Reform advocates noticed the conflicted response by Democrats who embraced them three years ago. The Young Women’s Freedom Center, where Brown worked to help at-risk women and trans people, called for “the defunding of the police and juvenile carceral system” after he was killed, along with an end to “contracting of armed security” and the “false narrative” that was justifying the city’s police spending.

In an interview, the group’s co-executive director Julia Arroyo said that young people were being victimized by media-driven panic about shoplifting: “Everything’s behind glass, you’re constantly followed.” And at a rally, Arroyo said that the city was “kidnapping us and they are locking us up in jails and institutions.”

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

While much of the political conversation around Neely has focused on why he had not been either jailed or reached by social services earlier, the picture of what went wrong is murkier. He had been listed as a priority by city agencies, referred to a psychiatric hospital in the past, and even been forced into a treatment facility as part of an assault charge — there was a warrant out for his arrest after he fled the institution.

Steve Berg, the chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said that enforcement or treatment approaches would fall short without a path to transitional housing — something that cities have often struggled to do, in part because of local opposition to new facilities or programs.

“The solution is largely to get people housed, so they’re not homeless, and to make treatment available on an immediate basis for anyone who wants it,” said Berg. “Most people do want it. But mental health treatment is not going to be effective for people who are living on the streets instead of permanent housing. That’s just the reality. There’s lots of research to back that up.”

He added that some elected officials were creating a “very dangerous situation,” when they suggested that the killing of some homeless people might be justified.

THE VIEW FROM DONALD TRUMP

Homelessness has been an issue in the 2024 Republican primary, where candidates have cited it as proof of Democratic policy failures. Donald Trump has proposed banning “urban camping,” arresting violators, and giving them the option of treatment or prison. “The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs,” he said in a video last month. “Americans should not have to step over piles of needles and waste.”

NOTABLE

• In the Guardian, Sam Levin talks to friends and family mourning Brown, who was a fixture of the city’s trans district. “It hurts me that another trans person of color is gone without being seen,” Juju Pikes Prince, one close friend, said. “We can’t keep screaming and hollering for Black Lives Matter when we don’t all matter. My people are not free.”
• At Curbed, Bridget Read looks at Neely’s career as a Michael Jackson impersonator, where he was a well-known part of a community of Time Square performers in better times. “I was always in awe seeing him dance when I did,” one performer said.

OHIO

Republicans in Columbus scheduled an August special election to make amending the state constitution more difficult, raising the threshold for passage from a simple majority to 60% of the vote. “How stupid do you think the people of Ohio are?” House Democratic leader Allison Russo asked during a floor debate, where her party warned that the change was being proposed to make it harder for abortion rights advocates to win a referendum.

The Great Task, “Risk.” Ex-Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney launched a PAC not long after Trump-backed Republican Harriet Hageman defeated her in a primary for her seat. Running in New Hampshire, this is Cheney’s first 2024 ad, 60 seconds of footage from the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021 and a voiceover about how Trump’s “proven he is unfit for office.”

Ryan Quarles for Governor, “Mud Slingin.’” Kentucky’s primary ends on Tuesday, and two candidates — Attorney Gen. Daniel Cameron and former U.N. Ambassador Kelly Craft — have spent most of the money in the race for governor. Quarles, the state’s agricultural commissioner, is trying to run up the middle as the candidate who won’t go negative.

Wayne Williams for Colorado, “Vote for Williams.” Colorado Springs started holding direct mayoral elections in 1979. No Democrat has won the (technically nonpartisan) office. Yemi Mobolade, who got the most votes in round one, doesn’t belong to a party, but he’s supported by Democrats, and more liberal than Williams. The GOP candidate’s response: Mobolade could wreck Colorado Springs because he was “caught supporting socialist policies like engineering ‘equitable outcomes’ with taxpayer money.

No Trumps here: The Harrisburg-based GOP pollster only tested what Pennsylvanians think of the president, his strongest-polling Democratic challenger, and the Florida governor who isn’t running yet. It’s a twist, and it finds the president holding onto more Democrats than Kennedy in the state where he was born; nearly one in three Democrats are conflicted if Kennedy gets the nomination. He runs stronger than the president with Republicans, getting 12% of them to Biden’s 7%, but it doesn’t make up for the drift in his base.

Paid for by American Greatness, a pro-Trump website that celebrates the ex-president’s movement, this finds most Florida Republicans struggling to decide between him and DeSantis. No other candidate interests them right now, and Trump runs around the field largely because of voter confidence in how he’d handle the economy — a 26-point advantage over DeSantis. Florida Republicans who view both of them favorably break for Trump by 19 points. DeSantis, like most of the GOP field, has barely criticized Trump, and defended him from damaging investigations, but it hasn’t made many MAGA converts.

WHITE HOUSE

Donald Trump returned to CNN for a prime time town hall that pleased his supporters and, Democrats say, gave them fresh material to throw at him next year.

Among the opposition researcher highlights: A proud endorsement of overturning Roe v. Wade, a lengthy defense of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, a perhaps legally risky reference to his handling of classified documents that he brought from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and more claims that E. Jean Carroll, fresh off her court victory, was lying about him: “I swear on my children, which I never do, I have no idea who this woman [is].” (The media criticism of the town hall focused, mostly, on the decision to fill the audiences with Republicans and discourage it from booing.)

With two exceptions — ex-Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and ex-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — Trump’s GOP opponents blew off the Carroll verdict. “I think the focus has to be not to be distracted,” Nikki Haley told Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday. “That’s why we’ve got to leave the baggage and the negativity behind.”

Haley campaigns in Iowa next week; Ron DeSantis arrives on Saturday, joining Rep. Randy Feenstra for his “family picnic” event in deep red northwest Iowa. En route, he picked up endorsements from state Senate President Amy Sinclair and House Majority Leader Matt Windschitl.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams managed one of the first primaries during the COVID pandemic, cut bipartisan ballot access deals with the state’s Democratic governor, and presided over a surge in GOP registrations. He’s got two challengers in the May 16 Republican primary anyway — one supported by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, both suggesting that Kentucky’s elections can be rigged on the order of George Soros. And candidates like that have had some appeal in similar races.

“I’ve never polled this race,” Adams said in an interview. “I probably should have… the people who hate my guts are really motivated.” He talked with Americana about his record and his “kook” critics, and this is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Americana: Your campaign has said that electing you would mean “closing the door on the clown show.” Can you unpack that a little? How would you close down the clown show?

Michael Adams: It’s not just me and my opponents on the ballot. Misinformation is on the ballot — whether we’re going to be a fact- and rationality-based government, when it comes to elections, or whether we’re gonna let conspiracy theorists run the show. It’s important that we have free and fair elections in a legitimate system. It’s also important for the image of our state and for our business environment that we’re not seen as a bunch of nut jobs, putting some kook into this very critical office.

Americana: How do you campaign against them? Do they confront you at events? I know that they were unhappy that they didn’t get into a TV debate.

Michael Adams: I don’t really interact with them at Republican events. I just go up and make my case. I’ve talked about how I implemented photo ID to vote, how I cleaned up the voter rolls, how I transitioned the state to paper ballots so we can audit. I’ve banned ballot harvesting, by working with the legislature to pass a law. I’ve got a positive record of basically a conservative wish list, all the things that we on our side of the aisle wanted. So I don’t interact with those guys. I do take shots on social media, but I’m not gonna get into a mud-wrestling match.

Americana: One claim they’ve made is that there are still more registered voters than county residents in most of Kentucky, and the number keeps going up.

Michael Adams: It’s just made up. They never offer a basis for it other than their own math. We’ve put out a map from our office showing that 82 of our 120 counties actually have fewer voters on the rolls than they did before. You’re talking about 320,000 voters in a state with 3.5 million registered voters. That’s a huge number. It’s taken three years of painstaking work to do that. But my opponents, when they say this stuff,  the number changes, the number of counties changes, the number of registration changes, and it’s just wrong.

Americana: You’ve kept Kentucky in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) as some red states got out of it, over this worry that it’s funded by George Soros (it isn’t). Why should a state stay in it?

Michael Adams: I can tell you how it’s been beneficial to us. Number one, we had to use it because the rolls were so dirty that before I took office, a federal judge in Frankfort ordered my predecessor to join ERIC. Since then, we’ve used it very successfully. We had a month where we took 10,000 dead voters off the rolls. None of them lived in Kentucky. They were all people that had lived in Kentucky previously, and then relocated, largely, to Florida. We never would have found that without ERIC. The state that quits it loses the benefit of being able to use that information efficiently.

Americana: Dozens of election workers and clerks have quit since 2020 after harassment from people who think that race was stolen. If you win again, what can you do to reverse that trend?

Michael Adams: I’ll be honest, my power is limited. What I have done is trying to get their back. I’ve gone out of my way, on television, at events, and everywhere else explaining why the things that these folks are saying are false. We have an FAQ, an election rumor control page on our website. We’re very proactive in confronting these things. And every time we debunk one of these conspiracy theories, that disappears, and then some new variant pops up six months later, just like COVID.

In 2020, they were saying, oh, we’re going to have all this mass fraud because you’re allowing people to not vote in person and mail in a vote. And then Donald Trump had the biggest victory he’d ever had in Kentucky, and Republicans won everything. We debunked the notion that we were gonna have all this mass fraud and Democrats were going to cheat. Things calmed down for a while, then in 2022, we had fringe candidates who lost by large margins, then sued us and demanded that there be recounts. Every time we debunk one of these theories, they don’t accept any shame or responsibility. They just disappear into their burrows, and then they come back out with a new theory, like nothing ever happened.

• Four days until primaries in Kentucky and Philadelphia
• 119 days until the special congressional election in Rhode Island
• 177 days until elections in Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Virginia
• 543 days until the 2024 presidential election

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— Dave