SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Politics & the Nation
BY PAUL FARHIA federal judge issued a series
of preliminary injunctions
against a Trump appointee who
has enacted sweeping and con-
troversial changes at Voice of
America and other government-
funded news networks, effective-
ly stopping the appointee’s ef-
forts to reshape the international
broadcasters.
The ruling late Friday by
Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl
A. Howell in Washington was a
setback for Michael Pack, who in
June took over VOA’s parent
agency, the U.S. Agency for Glob-
al Media (USAGM), and im-
mediately set about firing senior
leaders and disbanding over-
sight boards.
Pack had asserted the right to
direct how journalists at VOA
and sister networks such as Ra-
dio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
and Radio Free Asia covered the
news, a violation of the tradition-
al “firewall” that ensures the
networks aren’t government
mouthpieces. Pack’s declaration
was viewed by journalists at the
networks as both alarming and
ironic, given that their broad-
casts — which are intended to
counter foreign government’s of-
ficial censorship and propa-
ganda — would themselves be
subjected to potential censor-
ship by a political appointee of
the U.S. government.
Pack’s actions and statements,
including evidence-free sugges-
tions that VOA was a nest of
foreign spies, raised concerns
that Pack was seeking to create
news favorable to President
Trump, his political patron.
Howell’s ruling was in re-
sponse to a lawsuit filed last
month by five senior executives
at USAGM whom Pack had fired
or suspended in August in what
was seen as a purge of those
opposed to Pack’s plans. The
former employees sought to stop
Pack from interfering in theeditorial affairs of the broadcast-
ers his agency oversees.
In a ruling issued late Friday,
Howell imposed preliminary in-
junctions that effectively bar
Pack from direct involvement in
the networks’ editorial opera-
tions.
The ruling prevents Pack from
making personnel decisions in-
volving journalists at the net-
works; from directly communi-
cating with editors and journal-
ists employed by them; and from
investigating any editors or news
stories produced by them.
The judge also said an investi-
gation ordered by Pack early last
month of VOA’s chief White
House reporter, Steve Herman,
“imposes an unconstitutional
prior restraint not just on Her-
man’s speech, but on the speech
of [Herman’s editors] and jour-
nalists at VOA.”
Pack ordered the investigation
of Herman because of unspeci-
fied concerns about bias in Her-
man’s coverage of Trump. But no
finding or disciplinary measures
resulted from it.
Lee R. Crain, one of the attor-
neys who represented the plain-
tiffs, said Howell’s ruling ensures
that journalists at the agencies
can “rest assured that the First
Amendment protects them from
government efforts to control”
their reporting. “They are free to
do exactly what Congress intend-
ed: export independent, First
Amendment-style journalism to
the world.”
USAGM’s representatives did
not respond to a request for
comment.
The order won’t restore the
jobs of the employees whom Pack
fired, including Grant Turner,
the named plaintiff. (Turner had
been USAGM’s chief financial
officer when Pack fired him and
the other senior employees.) The
former employees’ work status is
the subject of a separate admin-
istrative process.
It’s unclear whether USAGM
will appeal Howell’s ruling given
its timing and the likelihood that
President-elect Joe Biden will
probably replace Pack upon as-
suming the White House on
Jan. 20. Biden’s aides have said
that he intends to fire Pack.
[email protected]Trump appointee’s VOA
e≠orts halted by judge
He has sought to reshape
Voice of America,
related news networksJONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
Voice of America headquarters in D.C. Michael Pack took over
VOA’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, in June.BY MORIAH BALINGITAs coronavirus rates rise to
unprecedented levels in the Unit-
ed States, school officials are once
again struggling with whether to
allow schoolchildren into class-
rooms or to keep them home,
trying to balance the needs of
their most vulnerable charges
with the risks a surging pandemic
could pose to students and staff —
all with little guidance from the
federal government.
Last week, New York City, once
the epicenter of the pandemic
and home to the nation’s largest
school system, announced it
would close its school buildings
as positivity rates rose to 3 per-
cent. Several districts in Iowa,
where schools cannot shutter un-
less positivity rates reach 15 per-
cent, have gone remote. Kentucky
Gov. Andy Beshear (D) this past
week ordered all schools to close,
and Michigan Gov. Gretchen
Whitmer (D) has closed all high
schools.
Dozens of districts, including
those in Chicago, Sacramento
and Minneapolis, remain closed
and expressed dwindling hope of
reopening anytime soon given
the conditions. Seattle earlier this
month decided to keep schools
closed until the end of January.
Miami Superintendent Alberto
Carvalho said the past week that
he was convening a task force to
determine if the schools should
shutter, as the number of new
cases begins to rise. On Friday,
Miami-Dade County reported
more than 2,000 new cases.
The United States recorded
more than 196,000 new coronavi-
rus infections Friday, once again
breaking the record for the most
new infections on a single day.
The death toll surpassed 250,
on Thursday, marking another
grim milestone. The pandemic
shows little sign of slowing.
The spread in infection has
meant that some districts that
want to keep their doors open
have so many staff out sick or in
quarantine that they can no lon-
ger operate schools.
The wave of closures is run-
ning up against pressure from
parents, governors and the
Trump administration to keep
schools open. A coalition of seven
governors from northeastern
states, including New York, put
out a statement Thursday urging
schools to keep their doors open.
“Medical research as well as
data from Northeastern states,
from across the country, and
from around the world make it
clear that in-person learning is
safe when the appropriate pro-
tections are in place, even in
communities with high transmis-
sion rates,” the statement read.
Schools that have held in-per-
son classes have reported that
even when they have cases of
infection, they don’t believe there
was spread in classrooms.
A day after New York City
announced it was closing its
schools, Vice President Pence
held a coronavirus task force
briefing — the first since July — to
voice his support for keeping
schools open, even as the pan-
demic worsens in many places.
“President Trump wanted me
to make it clear that our task
force, this administration and
our president does not support
another national lockdown and
we do not support closing
schools,” Pence said.
Robert Redfield, director of the
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, echoed Pence’s com-
ments, saying he believed that
schools could operate “safely and
responsibly.”
“One of the safest places they
can be, from our perspective, is to
remain in school,” Redfield.
Trump began his campaign to
reopen schools in midsummer,
blasting those who chose to keep
them closed as trying to under-
mine him politically, threatening
to withhold funding from dis-
tricts that did not reopen, and
openly disagreeing with recom-
mendations laid out by his ownpublic health department. His
tack, frequently delivering his
messages in all caps over Twitter,
backfired, leading some school
officials to grow suspect of the
administration’s recommenda-
tions.
But now, other voices have
joined the call to reopen schools.
They include critics who have
begun questioning why some
places have shut down schools
but left open bars and restau-
rants. And the widespread school
outbreaks that many feared have
largely not materialized, accord-
ing to existing data, leading some
to say that students and teachers
are unlikely to catch the virus in
school — particularly if they are
masked.
School officials who want to
keep their schools open — and
believe that they are safe — are
running into another barrier. In
some cases, so many teachers are
out sick or quarantined that there
are not enough to supervise stu-
dents. It’s a conundrum that has
forced schools in rural North
Dakota and Illinois to shut down.
PJ Caposey, who leads a small
school district about 90 miles
west of Chicago, said he believes
his schools are safe and sends his
own children in to school build-
ings. Under the current model,
elementary school children can
attend classes every day, whereas
middle and high school students
attend only part of the week and
learn virtually the rest of the
time.
But his staff is stretched so thin
that secretaries are sometimes
playing substitute teachers. He
had to shut down one school
because they could not find
enough adults to run it. As of
Friday, he had 27 staff members
in quarantine.
Ogle County, where his district
is based, has been averaging
more than 50 new cases a day
over the last week — an astonish-
ing figure for a county of about
50,000 people. Friday, after pleas
from the health department andlocal hospitals, he agreed to close
school buildings from Thanksgiv-
ing until mid-January. Parents in
the conservative county were fu-
rious, he said.
“Now we’re just at a point that
regionally that it’s so out of con-
trol here we don’t really have a
choice,” Caposey said.
Robin Lake, director of the
Center on Reinventing Public
Education, anticipated more
school districts would follow
New York City’s footsteps. The
center has been closely monitor-
ing how schools respond to coro-
navirus and in an analysis re-
leased earlier this month found
that schools were trending
toward reopening. She expects a
reversal of that.
“When a big district like New
York City reverses course, other
districts look at that and think,
‘Well, if they can’t do it, maybe we
can’t either,’ ” Lake said.
So much of the dialogue has
been about whether schools
should reopen — and Lake said
that some school districts may
have to accept that it is not in the
cards, and plan for more robust
virtual learning.
Erika Kendall, a Brooklyn
mother and school activist who
heads her local school advisory
council, said conversations and
resources need to shift to how the
New York City school system can
improve virtual learning. Fami-
lies that opted for remote learn-
ing are disproportionately Black,
Asian and Latino — a reflection,
to some extent, of the trauma the
pandemic wrought on their com-
munities.
She said there are plenty of
benefits for children to be in
school buildings, but “it’s not
going to be easy to translate that
by remote.”
“But how can you get as close
as possible if we’re constantly
obsessing over getting every child
back in the building,” Kendall
said. “We can’t ever really have
that conversation.”
[email protected]School leaders face closures again as cases rise
BY TOM JACKMANIn Greensboro, N.C., the vio-
lence has gotten so extreme that a
shootout erupted in front of the
county courthouse the other day,
across the street from the sher-
iff’s office, leaving a 20-year-old
man dead. Greensboro set a city
record with 45 homicides last
year, and, as of Friday, already
had 54 this year.
“We’ve always had a level of
gang activity,” Greensboro Police
Chief Brian James said in an
interview, “but it’s more prolific
now. I’m not sure what’s changed,
but the offenders are more bold
than they’ve ever been.”
Homicides across America
rose more than 28 percent in the
first nine months of this year, and
aggravated assaults increased
9 percent, while rapes and rob-
beries saw significant drops com-
pared with the same period last
year, according to statistics com-
piled this month from 223 police
agencies by the Major Cities
Chiefs Association and the Police
Executive Research Forum.
Some police commanders say
the twin impacts of the coronavi-
rus and civil uprisings against
police violence caused them to
redirect their officers away from
proactive anti-crime programs,
whether due to virus-related
budget cuts or strategic redeploy-
ment of forces to handle the
unrest. Other officials point to
job loss and other stresses of the
pandemic as fueling tension and
leading to violence. And with
many schools shuttered, police
say, many areas have seen a rise
in violence involving juveniles.
Fort Worth saw a 66 percent
increase in killings in the first
nine months of the year, and
Boston recorded a 52 percent
jump. Cities that experienced tu-
multuous protests in the wake of
police killings saw some of the
highest homicide spikes: Minne-
apolis’s total went from 33 in the
first nine months of last year, to
61 this year, an 85 percent in-
crease. Louisville has seen a
79 percent increase, Portland a
68 percent increase, and Milwau-
kee’s homicides have more than
doubled, from 67 to 141, a 110 per-
cent increase.
“We haven’t seen numbers like
this since the ’90s,” said PERF
Executive Director Chuck Wexler.
“We’ve had 20 years of steady
declines in crime. Is this just an
aberration, or does this portend
something for the future? This
has been under the radar because
of the pandemic, but something’s
happening across the country in
the most serious crimes. The next
administration, they’re going to
have to pay serious attention to
this.”
In the Washington region, the
numbers are mostly bad: D.C.
police reported homicides up
13 percent in the first nine
months of 2020, and Prince
George’s County is up 58 percent,
while Montgomery and Fairfax
counties have also seen increases.
But in both Baltimore City and
Baltimore County, homicides and
aggravated assaults have actually
declined from the same period
last year.
The Major Cities Chiefs first
surveyed 67 big-city police de-
partments, finding an aggregate
28.7 percent increase in slayings
and 10.6 percent rise in aggravat-
ed assaults, but a nearly 17 per-
cent decline in rapes and a
10.5 percent drop in robberies.
PERF then obtained data from
another 156 agencies, ranging
from departments with fewer
than 50 officers to those with
more than 250 officers. Combin-
ing the smaller jurisdictions withthe larger ones from the Major
Cities survey, PERF found the
numbers were the same:
28.2 percent rise in homicides,
9.3 percent increase in aggravat-
ed assaults, with similar double-
digit drops in rapes and robber-
ies.
In Kansas City, Kan., homi-
cides have risen from 23 to 40,
and aggravated assaults are up
75 percent. “People are in crisis,”
Wyandotte County District Attor-
ney Mark A. Dupree Sr. told The
Post. “We’ve had so many people
stuck in their homes, not going to
work, not going to church. Just
sitting idle, and like my grand-
mother used to say, ‘Idle hands
are the devil’s workshop.’ We’re
seeing people dying of silliness,
for no reason. A year ago, we
weren’t seeing that.”
About 73 percent of big cities
reported decreases in robberies,
and 86 percent have seen drops
in rapes. “With fewer people out
and about, there are fewer oppor-
tunities to commit robberies,”
Houston Assistant Chief Heather
Morris told PERF.
But Houston’s homicide total
is up 35 percent, and Morris
blamed bail reform for some of
that. “We had 28 suspects last
year who were on bond or parole
when they committed a murder,”
Morris said, “and this year we’ve
had 44. The person who killedone of our officers a week ago was
out on $100 bond for unlawfully
possessing a weapon.... Bond
reform in some cases is needed,
but you have people who alleged-
ly committed violent crimes get-
ting out on bond when they
haven’t in the past.”
Of the large cities surveyed,
70 percent had an increase in
homicides, 21 percent had a de-
crease, and 9 percent had no
change. Including all 223 agen-
cies surveyed, 58 percent saw a
rise in homicide, 20 percent had
decreases, and 22 percent —
mostly smaller agencies — had no
change.
The survey’s findings continue
a trend in 2020 first diagnosed by
Richard Rosenfeld, a criminolo-
gist at the University of Missouri-
St. Louis, in a July study of 27 U.S.
cities. Property crimes such as
burglary and auto theft dropped,
but homicides and aggravated
assaults were already showing
significant rises by June. Rosen-
feld likened the trend to crime
increases that occurred in the
aftermath of police violence and
protests in Ferguson, Mo., Balti-
more and Chicago in 2014 and
2015, in which “de-policing” as a
reaction to the protests enabled
more crime, and that police lost
legitimacy and trust in minority
and poorer communities.
[email protected]Killings skyrocket in major cities across the U.S.
SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST
Homicide detectives gather at the scene of a fatal shooting in Detroit on Aug. 14, 2018. Of 67 large
cities surveyed by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, 47 have had an increase in homicides this year.Highest spikes in areas
rocked by p rotests in the
wake of police violence