Wednesday, February 1, 2023

White House directs Pentagon to initiate military compensation review- The Federal Report

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Federal News Network - The Federal Report - February 01, 2023

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** Defense

White House directs Pentagon to initiate military compensation review

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** Tom Temin Commentary

The obscure system that personifies the need for modernization

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** Pay

Initial plans to cap pay raise for hundreds of NSF employees gain major union pushback

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** Federal Newscast

PRAC: Potentially over $5 billion in fraudulent pandemic loans from SBA

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** Veterans Affairs

House Republicans chart paths to reform - or end - VA's troubled EHR rollout

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** Insight by Rubrik

Now that turning back time is no longer a viable option, agencies need to move a data protection model that's built around a single source of truth, recommends Rubrik's Aaron Lewis. We talk to him during our Industry Exchange Cyber.

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VA embraces AI to improve radiology screening : Following on the heels of a successful pilot that brought artificial intelligence to bear on radiology diagnoses, the Department of Veterans Affairs is looking for new opportunities to enhance its health care with AI.

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** The Space Hour

From the ocean to up above, NOAA is getting ready to monitor traffic in space

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** Contracting

Increased contract spending a boon for small businesses

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** Automation

Customs and Border Protection launches latest update to a very old system

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** Technology

What the FAA messaging system debacle said to all federal contractors

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**Advertisement

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** Veterans Affairs

VA says it's ready to process all the burn pit claims pouring in

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** Accelerating Government

Accelerating Government with ACT-IAC - Episode 24: Digital Transformation and Cyber Compliance

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** Commentary

One-year anniversary of the CX EO: Embracing a citizen-centric mindset

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Yellen takes a test drive

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The Morning: Policing the wrong way

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Continue reading the main story

February 1, 2023

By German Lopez

Good morning. Memphis's Scorpion is the latest special police unit to come under scrutiny.

The Memphis Police Department's Scorpion unit in 2021.Memphis Police Department, via Reuters

Culture of impunity

The Memphis police officers charged in the death of Tyre Nichols were part of an elite unit known as Scorpion that was set up to crack down on high-crime neighborhoods. The officers' actions as they stopped and beat Nichols show how the squad's work could, and did, go very wrong.

Stories of botched work by special law enforcement units are notably common in the U.S. In Baltimore, members of a gun-tracing task force robbed residents of cash, drugs and jewelry. By the time federal officials investigated the New Orleans Police Department in 2010, residents perceived its special units as corrupt and brutal. In Los Angeles, a "special investigation section" in the 1990s was involved in multiple deadly shootouts. There are many more examples.

Police departments establish these squads with a good intention: addressing a genuine crime problem. But they fall short in the implementation — tainted by poor leadership, the wrong benchmarks or a culture of impunity.

Today's newsletter will explain how Scorpion, which officials in Memphis disbanded last week, fit into a broader pattern in American law enforcement of well-intentioned efforts to fight crime instead leading to abuses.

A sound idea

The Memphis Police Department founded the Scorpion unit in late 2021 to do what officials call "hot-spot" policing.

For regular readers of this newsletter, the term may sound familiar. The idea is to focus police resources on high-crime neighborhoods or city blocks or even people (such as repeat offenders). They can also zero in on specific crimes, like shootings or drug trafficking.

The term is broad, and over time just about every big-city police department in the U.S. has said it is focusing on hot spots in some way. When done correctly, the strategy reduces crime without simply displacing it to other areas, studies have found.

But those three words are the catch: when done correctly. "When people use the term 'hot-spot policing,' that could mean lots of different things," said Anna Harvey, a public safety researcher at New York University.

Many departments ignore important tenets of the concept, sometimes resulting in abuses. For example, the Louisville, Ky., police unit that investigated Breonna Taylor's ex-boyfriend was also following a hot-spot model. (Officers shot Taylor to death in her home in 2020.)

In some hot-spot efforts, police officers merely try to make their presence known — to produce a kind of scarecrow effect, as people are less likely to commit crimes in front of an officer. In others, officers aggressively enforce the law with as many stops and arrests as possible. Exemplary hot-spot policing demands a balancing act between maximizing the deterrence of officers' presence and minimizing the social costs of hassling, stopping and arresting more people.

"You can do hot-spot policing in a way that's super aggressive, or you can do it in a way that's more respectful," said Neil Gross, a sociologist at Colby College who studies the police.

Flawed implementation

So what went wrong in Memphis? Officials appeared to emphasize the wrong things, experts said.

Police officials deployed Scorpion to the city's most volatile neighborhoods — "hot spots" — to crack down on all sorts of crimes, like reckless driving or shootings, with punitive tactics even against minor offenses.

City officials praised Scorpion for high arrest numbers, effectively encouraging aggressive tactics. Chief Cerelyn Davis lauded the approach, advocating "being tough on tough people." (Officials could have emphasized other goals, like reductions in crime rates in specific neighborhoods, to help focus officers on results instead of antagonistic methods, experts said.)

"It's the command staff implementing a version of hot-spot policing that is not consistent with what the research evidence says is best," Harvey said.

The unit also seemed captured by a culture of impunity. Consider that at least some of the officers who beat Nichols were wearing cameras that were recording their actions. The fact that they punched and kicked Nichols anyway suggests that they thought they were above the law and could get away with it, said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

It is a common phenomenon among American police departments: Evidence-based policies can fall apart in their implementation. Researchers can call for law enforcement strategies that focus on specific places and people and try to minimize the social costs. But if those ideas are filtered through a culture or leadership style that prizes toughness and aggressive action, they can lead to abuse.

More Tyre Nichols news

Four officers charged in Nichols's death had been disciplined before, including two who hadn't reported using force during arrests, records show.
Nichols's family and the broader community will mourn him at his funeral today.

Continue reading the main story

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed to overhaul Florida's higher education system. His plans would eliminate diversity programs and reduce tenure protections.
Republicans won't say which spending cuts they want in the debt ceiling showdown. President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy are meeting about it today.
Bias and human error played a role in the F.B.I.'s failure to predict — or prevent — the Capitol riot, new documents suggest.
Representative George Santos, whose résumé was full of fabrications, said he would temporarily recuse himself from his congressional committees.

International

Reviewing drone videos near Bakhmut, Ukraine.Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Russia is sending large numbers of soldiers into Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine that has become an epicenter of fighting.

This week's attack on a mosque in Pakistan that killed more than 100 people has raised fears of a new wave of militancy.

Italy's older population is growing, and its birthrate is plummeting, making it the West's fastest-shrinking nation.

The Justice Department charged four men in the U.S. with involvement in the 2021 assassination of Haiti's president.

MORNING READS

The Navy's Marine Mammal Program in San Diego.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York Times

Mine hunters: These Navy dolphins may be geriatric, but they still have a lot to teach us.

Memes, rants, private parts: Dissecting Elon Musk's tweets.

The last Boeing 747: The "Queen of the Skies" has left the factory.

Bog bodies: Ancient remains reveal an often-violent burial ritual.

Advice from Wirecutter: Weatherize your home.

Lives Lived: Harold Brown was one of the last surviving Black pilots of the Tuskegee Airmen and faced a lynch mob of villagers in Austria after his plane was downed in 1945. He died at 98.

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

Hires: Sean Payton, arguably the best coaching candidate on the market, is the new head coach in Denver. The Texans hired another hot name: the 49ers defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans.

A unique call: North Carolina's new women's field hockey coach is Erin Matson, a 22-year-old former star player.

Continue reading the main story

ARTS AND IDEAS

Salman Rushdie in 2015.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A resilient author's return

Salman Rushdie, the author and free speech icon, was stabbed onstage last summer after years of living under the threat of a fatwa. Though the attack left him blind in one eye, he pushed ahead with releasing a new novel. "Victory City," out next week, is the story of a long-lost empire, told as a translation of a fictitious Sanskrit epic.

Fellow writers are seizing the moment to turn attention back to Rushdie's fiction. "In the face of danger, even in the face of death, he manages to say that storytelling is one currency we all have," the novelist Colum McCann said.

The Times review: "Blindness is foretold in the novel's very first sentence," Michael Gorra writes. "In its haunting, uncanny, predictive power 'Victory City' shows once again why his work will always matter."

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

Armando Rafael for The New York Times

Rotisserie chicken makes for a nourishing pasta sauce.

What to Read

The novel "Stolen," by Ann-Helén Laestadius, reflects the culture of an Indigenous people living near the Arctic Circle to a broad audience.

What to Watch

"Pamela, a Love Story" powerfully rewinds Pamela Anderson's life and fame.

Late Night

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live."

Now Time to Play

The pangram from yesterday's Spelling Bee was pinewood. Here is today's puzzle.

Here's today's Mini Crossword, and a clue: In good shape (five letters).

And here's today's Wordle.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German

P.S. Sia Michel, an innovative journalist who has edited Pulitzer Prize-winning criticism, is The Times's new Culture editor.

Here's today's front page.

"The Daily" is about the U.S. economy.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.