Daily Archives: August 14, 2021

US Census: America is getting less 'white' for first time ever

The United States is an increasingly diverse and urbanized nation, according to statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

STAFF VIDEO, USA TODAY

Phoenix grew at a faster rate than any other major city in the last decade, officially surpassing Philadelphia asthe nation's fifth largest city, new data from the 2020 census show.

Buckeye and Goodyear are both among the 10 fastest-growing cities, with populations of at least 50,000,in the nation,the data show. Buckeye grew faster than any other city in the nation, with population growing nearly 80% in the last decade to reach more than91,000.

Phoenix grew by more than 160,000 people from 2010 to 2020, an increase of 11.2%.

The datareleasedThursday by the U.S. Census Bureau provides the firstlocal demographiccounts from the 2020 census. Theseshow how population has changeddown to the neighborhoodlevel and within demographic groups over the last decade.

The data release is intended to help draw congressional, state legislative and local districts, but also gives insight into total population, voting age population, population breakdowns by race and ethnicity, the number of housing units and whether they are vacant or occupied and thepopulation in group quarters such as prisons or college dormitories.

The counts in this data go all the way down to the block level, the smallest level ofcensus geographythat the bureau uses as the building blocks for counts for larger geographies such as towns, cities, counties or American Indian reservations.

The decennial census, which is an attempt to count everyone living in the United States as of April 1 of the census year, has traditionally come with changes in process and been subject tounexpected events. However, the 2020 census faced unique challenges amidthe COVID-19 pandemic and increasedpoliticization around the census.

Even as 2020 marked the first timeAmericans could complete the census questionnaire online, the bureau suspended on-the-groundoperations in March 2020and did not resume until May.Pandemic-related delays pushed back the bureaus timeline, but the Trump administrationsought to cut the count short before the bureaus revised deadline.After a lawsuit by civil rights groups extended the count by a few weeks,the count concluded in mid-October.

The pandemic and changing timelinemadeefforts by grassroots groups to encourage participation in the censuschallenging, particularly in communities of color that have been undercounted in past censuses.The Trump administrations failed attempt to first add a citizenship question to the 2020 census and later to systematically removeundocumented immigrants from census counts wereobstacles to getting a complete count in some communities.

A survey taken by the Pew Research Center in early 2020 found that a majority ofthose who took the survey incorrectly believed that the 2020 census would ask questions about citizenship.

While the Census Bureau is required by law to keep individual responses private,for data from the 2020 census,the bureau is using anew technique called differential privacy to protect these responses.This method allows the bureau to reveal more details about how it adds noise to different tabulations to protectprivacy, buthasled some data users to raise concerns about the accuracy of the counts.

The 2020 census also made changes to the questions that were asked and to how itinterpretedthe data it collected.For the first time, respondents were able to specify same-sex spouses and partners when answering questions about the relationship between household members.The2020questionnaireadded write-in boxes for people to further describe their race and updates toracialcategoriesand question instructions. Thebureau will also capture moredetailedinformationaboutrace and Hispanic origin.

However, the data released for redistricting will only reflect information about race and Hispanic origin rolled up into a small number of categories. The bureau will release more detailed data on race and ethnicity, as well as the relationship between members of a household, more specific age breakdowns and numbers about homeownership in future releases. The bureau has not yet released a timelinefor future data releases.

The growth that this census data demonstrates comes as no surprise. Weve long known that Phoenix is a top destination to live and work, said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego.

But some dimensions of that growth, likea resurgence of the downtown, were surprising toPhoenix Community and Economic Development Director Christine Mackay.

If you would have asked me a decade ago if people were going to live in downtown Phoenix, I would have said thats never going to happen, Mackay said.

After the 1970s, downtown Phoenix saw its population leave for the freeways and malls of the suburbs. Mackay explained. The factors bringing them back to the downtown, and to Phoenix are different than what drew people to Arizona in past decades.

People are coming here now not because of resorts, golf courses and retirement, but to find high tech jobs and a great quality of life, Mackay said.

Moreover, while workers have traditionally moved to find jobs, in the last decade, Mackay has seen a shift to workers with desirable skills choosing where they want to live, and the jobs following.

More jobs in the technology sector are reversing a brain drain from Arizonas universities and are creating a more diverse culture, attracting workers from other large metropolitan areas as well as preventing the loss of Arizonans with technical skills to places like Silicon Valley, Mackay said. This growth, as well as the changing tastes of these workers, means reevaluating the citys transportation infrastructure to include more mass transit.

"Were Arizona. Were always going to be married to our car, thats who we are, Mackay said. As people are coming in from more urban cities, theyre much more used to a transit system.

Responding to the news that his city grew faster than any other in the U.S. with a population of 50,000 or more,Buckeye Mayor Eric Orsborn said: There are so many exciting things happening in Buckeye. Our efforts to focus on providing a variety of housing options, attracting quality employers in energy, advanced manufacturing, logistics and distribution are paying off.

While the census numbers show that Buckeye has grown to more than 91,000 residents, BuckeyeEconomic Development Director and Deputy City ManagerDavid Roderique suspects the population is closer to 100,000 people.

"We as a community are growing so quickly, its hard to keep up with the numbers," Roderique said. Roderique said the city tracks residential building permits and uses average household size to get their own population estimates. Permits have been growing at a steady pace since April 1, 2020, the base date for the 2020 census, so the numbers released Thursday won't reflect recent population growth, Roderique said.

Population counts are important for attracting new businesses, retailers and services like schools and health care providers, Roderique said. Many large businesses have a threshold of population that a community will have to meet before they'll set up shop. The city also watches the data for planning infrastructure like roads and water and sewer lines and will use the census data to draw new city council districts.

Roderique said he expects Buckeye to continue to grow as other Valley communities start reaching the limits of available land.Buckeye is the one with all the land, Roderique said."We expect to remain a very high-growth community for a long time.

One way to measure the last decades growth is in new infrastructure, Goodyear City Manager Julie Karins said. Since 2010 the city has built two new fire stations, with a third in the works as well as a new police station and a surface water treatment plant. These serve a population that has grown by more than 30,000 (46%) from 2010 to 2020.

Supporting a growing population takes intentional planning.

For a community to embrace the growth and maintain a high quality of life for existing residents is something that we really focus on, Karins said. While state law requires larger towns and cities to develop a general plan that addresses things like land use, water resources, transportation and safety, Goodyear also has more specific long-term planning processes.

For the first time, Karins said, the city is developing a human services master plan.Data like the census counts will help inform what things like senior meal services, transit, and programming for preschool-age children as well as teenagers will look like in Goodyear.

I dont think we can assume that the Goodyear of the year 2000 is the same as 2020, Karins said. We dont want to be reactive.

Population counts are also key to revenue for Arizona cities like Goodyear. The states shared sales tax is allocated based on population and getting an accurate count helps make sure tax dollars are returned to communities.

According to Karins, the ability to complete the census online helped the community achieve a 70% self-response rate. Self-response provides the highest quality census data. When a household doesnt complete the census for themselves, the bureau will ask someone like a landlord or neighbor to fill in the gaps. In the absence of a proxy, the bureau uses statistical methods to make an educated guess about a household.

I do believe we had a good solid count, Karins said.

When the town of Queen Creekincorporatedin 1989,its population was about 2,700. Three decades later, its population isnearly 60,000.

In the last decade,the towns population more than doubled a faster rate of growth than any other incorporated place in the state faster even than Buckeye and Goodyear, which were among the fastest-growing larger cities in the nation.

Its just been profound, Town Manager John Kross said.

Kross said thetown has grown annually by 6-9% over the last decade, a rate thatsmore sustainable thanin the early 2000s.

We were overheating," Kross said. "That was not manageable. It was very, very challenging."

In those days, the town was growing faster than it could attract investment, which meant the town didnt have the revenue to update infrastructure like roads to match its growth, Kross said.

The town looks closely at data collected by the Census Bureau about population growth,median incomeandmedian age to help plan in a way that aligns investment and revenue with a growing population.

The private sector looks at those characteristics extremely closely too," Kross said. "Those will be keys for them that perhaps trigger new investment in the community.

Looking at population data by agealsohelps planfor things likeparks and recreational programming. Kross said that Mansel Carter Oasis Park ended up having twice the area allocatedfor things like a splash pad and play equipment that would appeal to younger park visitors when the town realized that young residents made up a substantial portion of the population. Children under the age of 18 make up nearly a thirdof Queen Creeks population, thenewly-releasedcensus data show.

While Phoenix and its suburbs have continued to see growth, the same isn't true for places elsewhere in the state. Growing up in the area,Douglas Mayor Donald Huishremembers when neighboring Agua Prieta, across the Mexican border, and Douglas had similar populations.

Whilethe Mexican citys population has grown, Douglas hasshrunkento around 16,500census data show, losingmorethan 800 residents (about 5%) since 2010, one of the larger population losses for incorporated places in the state.

Huish attributes the decline to aloss of job opportunities in the area. Most residents work for some branch ofgovernment, and even those jobs, such as at a state prison, tend to pay less than industries in past decades.When there are opportunities, even with the support of a local community college, it can be difficult to find workers with the right skills, Huish said.

The city also has lost population as some people have moved over the border to Mexico, where the cost of living is lower, Huish said.

Data showing a declining population, as well as theincome of residents can make it difficult to attract investment. Recently, a supermarket in the city announced it would be closing, citing the declining population as one reason it would be leaving the community. But Huish said he suspectsthe loss of customers from Mexico due to the border closure that prohibitstravel of Mexicans into the U.S.

It affects the whole region," Huish said "Thats why weve been preaching hard that we need to get this border open."

Originally posted here:

2020 census: Phoenix grows more than any other major city; Buckeye, Goodyear among fastest growing - The Arizona Republic

Allegheny County added 27,230 residents during the past decade, according to long-awaited data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. That 2.2 percent increase puts the countys population at slightly more than 1.25 million people, and it represents the first increase in the countys population since 1960, a time when the Pittsburgh Pirates played in Forbes Field and their fans were capable of feeling emotions other than existential despair.

Census figures also show the countys make-up becoming increasingly diverse and in some ways, increasingly complex. The number of residents who identified as having Asian ancestry increased by nearly 72 percent, according to an analysis by University of Pittsburgh researcher Chris Briem. The number of people who identified as Hispanic or being multiracial also leaped, by 80 percent and 190 percent respectively.

The city of Pittsburghs population, which has also experienced a decades-long decline, slid a little further but by less than 1 percent to land at 302,971. That keeps the city above a 300,000-person threshold that is often used to define a city as major. (Although a decent ballclub wouldnt hurt either.)

But the city's stabilizing overall head count conceals considerable shifts within its borders.

'Really drastic changes'The census reports a Black population within the city limits that is 13.4 percent lower than in 2010 a drop of 10,660 people, to 69,050. At the same time, the Black population in the rest of the county grew by 12,477. Taken together, the numbers offer strong proof that Black residents have moved across the city line and into nearby communities.

There were really drastic changes from neighborhood to neighborhood, said Matt Merriman-Preston, a political consultant who has long made a study of demographic trends. Black-majority neighborhoods in the East End and the neighborhoods in the North Side declined pretty significantly. But in the other East End neighborhoods, you see a huge increase in population.

His own analysis shows that City Council District 9, which represents Homewood and other mostly Black communities, lost more than 2,600 people, while nearby mostly white districts 7 and 8 grew by more than 2,000 people each.

Overall, the Black population in Pittsburgh now makes up 22.7 percent of the city, down from 26.1 percent in 2010. And Merriman-Preston says the job of ensuring that population is fairly represented may get trickier in the days ahead.

Mathematically, those Black residents would have proportional representation in city government if two of the nine members on City Council were Black. For years, the city's council map has been drawn to assure Black voters held the majority in two districts. But Merriman-Preston, who worked on drawing the council maps after the last census, says it wont be easy to do that again.

Ten years ago when we drew the lines, it was pretty difficult to find a shape that worked in order to draw two minority-majority districts," he said. With the Black population smaller and more geographically scattered, "Theres going to be challenges when the city does reapportionment this year," he said.

But that challenge may contain an opportunity, he adds, if Black voters end up having significant, even if not overwhelming, influence in more districts.

The question you have to answer is whether city voters are in the same place they were in 30 or 40 years ago, when only Black voters would vote for Black candidates, Merriman-Preston said. The citys nine school board districts regularly produce three Black board members, he noted, and the nomination of Ed Gainey as the Democrat running for mayor this spring suggests that attitudes among white voters are changing, even if we havent eliminated all the barriers to political power.

In fact, demographically, the group that would appear to have suffered the largest decline is people identifying themselves as white alone. Briem's analysis suggests their numbers dropped by nearly 51,000 countywide, and by nearly 12,000 in the city itself, during the past decade. But complicating efforts to gauge such changes is the fact that there was a massive increase by 43,000 in the county and more than 10,000 in the city in the number of people who reported being of more than one race.

Such shifts, said Briem and others, are shaped not just by a different demographic make-up, but by residents thinking about their own make-up differently.

The big getting biggerBut whatever the make-up of Allegheny Countys population, its raw growth is a notable reversal from earlier census estimates that the county would continue to shrink as well from the overall pattern in western Pennsylvania.

Only two other counties in the western part of the state grew at all during the past decade: Butler and Washington. And only Butlers 9,901-person increase was statistically notable: Washington grew by less than 1 percent. Every other county in the region lost residents, led by Westmorelands worst-in-state 10,506-person decline, with Cambrias 10,207-person loss close behind.

Indeed, both nationally and in Pennsylvania, most counties lost population during the past decade, with growth concentrated in large metro areas that have only gotten larger.

Philadelphia County added nearly 78,000 residents, a growth rate of more than 5 percent, and other southeastern Pennsylvania counties also enjoyed solid population increases.

The new census data will be used to draft new district maps for the states Congressional delegation which is set to shrink from 18 to 17 seats and for state legislators. Politically, the most obvious impact of the numbers is that the states political center of gravity is shifting eastward, towards Philadelphia and away from the lagging west. And broadly speaking, counties that have trended Republican in recent years have shrunk, as Democrats look to build on favorable trends in the suburban areas that have grown.

Some worst-case scenarios for Democrats which involved communities of color being undercounted with a loss in political weight for cities did not appear to bear fruit.

Still, challenges remain for Democrats going forward. The tendency of Democratic base voters to concentrate in urban areas can limit their partys options when it comes time to draw maps. That can give Republicans an advantage in representation not much different from intentional efforts to gerrymander districts.

The tendency for Democrats to pack themselves in is true everywhere in the country, said Merriman-Preston. We have a big problem with the map favoring smaller Republican districts. It makes it even more apparent that we will need a fair redistricting process.

Excerpt from:

Allegheny County Grows In Population And Complexity - 90.5 WESA

In the runup to the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd, prosecutors and defenders alike were extremely concerned with seating a jury. The court set aside three weeks just for the selection process.

Determined not to repeat the mistakes of earlier, racially charged and highly publicized trials, they set out to assemble a pool of prospective jurors who could truly be considered impartial and reflective of the surrounding community. Finding a group of men and women who had no strong feelings regarding the very public case was sure to be a challenge. But finding a racially representative jury would prove just as difficult.

Minneapolis is about 64 percent white and 20 percent Black. But according to figures from the State Court Administrators Office, the jury pool in Hennepin County where Minneapolis is located was 80 percent white and only 8 percent Black in 2020. In fact, looking at the demographics of Minneapolis juries in the years leading up to Chauvins day in court, it is clear balanced cross-sections of locals were rare, and predominately white juries were far more common.

Analyzing these data and crunching the numbers from courthouses around the country it is clear that while the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution compels state and federal courts to assemble impartial juries in criminal cases, in practice, the individuals occupying the jury box tend to live in a very different world than the defendants upon whom they pass judgement.

In the end, Chauvins jury comprised six white people, four Black people, and two people who identified as multicultural. By local standards, the group was considered remarkably diverse, and the verdict the jury delivered after 10 hours of deliberation was historic. Chauvin became the first Mineeapolis police officer charged with the murder of a Black man.

However, those Minneapolis jurors and the verdict they handed down look more like the exception that proves an unfair norm. Reversing this historic trend will not be easy, but that isnt stopping lawmakers and activists from pushing for more consistently fair and representative American juries.

One initiative aimed at balancing the scales of justice is working its way through the California legislature; if passed, it would go on trial in San Francisco beginning in 2022.

BE THE JURY

This is something that defenders and our clients have been noticing for a long time, says San Franciscos Public Defender Mano Raju, Its very difficult to get a jury of your peers.

While Californias courts do not collect information on jurors race, gender, ideology or income, the lack of racial representation in the states juries has been hard for public defenders to ignore, Raju says.

In an effort to turn the tide on the trend of off-balance juries, San Francisco Assemblymember Phil Ting introduced AB 1452 earlier this year. The bill would authorize a first-of-its- kind pilot program in the city called Be the Jury, which would compensate qualified, low-income jurors $100 a day for service. Championed by the citys treasurer, public defender, and district attorney, the goal is to make San Franciscos juries more racially and economically diverse.

Although our state boasts the highest minimum wage in the country $13 per hour for small employers and $14 per hour for larger employers California jurors are compensated just $15 per day beginning the second day of service. That puts the state on the lower end of the scale of juror compensation rates nationwide. By contrast, several states pay jurors less than $10 a day, while many pay $30 to $50 per day. State law requires employers give time off for jury duty, but nowhere does it state that they must pay employees while they serve.

Californias per diem jury duty rate would barely cover lunch in San Francisco, to say nothing of other costs, like parking or childcare.

To their credit, California judges understand this. Approximately 3,800 low-income San Franciscans were excused from service for financial hardships in 2018 and 2019, according to data provided by the Financial Justice Project, the organization funding Be the Jury. Unfortunately, dismissing large numbers of prospective jurors because it is economically infeasible for them to serve has other consequences.

A survey conducted by the Administrative Office of the Courts of California found that 35 percent of jurors reported that having to serve on a jury would deal a serious blow to their monthly budget. And considering that 59 percent of Black families and 53 percent of Latino families qualified as very low income last year, its not hard to connect the dots.

Were a very diverse city and we want to make sure that folks from all walks of life, all colors of your skin, have access to this opportunity, says Anne Stuhldreher, director of the Financial Justice Project, a department within the San Francisco treasurers office that evaluates how fees impact low-income residents. We know that income highly correlates with race.

For this reason, Stuhldreher supports the idea behind Be the Jury. This is a good test case for the state in terms of if this kind of compensation would make a difference in creating more economically and racially diverse juries, she says.

Douglas Welch, a San Francisco deputy public defender, says mostly white juries are problematic because everyone interprets evidence through the lens of their own lived experiences. Juries composed of individuals with higher incomes, who have enjoyed the benefits of generational wealth and white privilege, have less understanding of realities that some people live in, he says.

Welch also notes poor juror pay is not the only underlying cause of whitewashed juries in San Francisco. An exodus of people of color from the city over the past few decades is also a major factor.

The burgeoning cost of San Francisco real estate has pushed out middle class residents of all ethnicities, but disproportionately impacts people of color. Furthermore, gentrification driven and informed by the tastes of young tech workers has transformed vast swaths of the city erasing cultural institutions and touchstones and changing the fabric of neighborhoods that were once predominantly Black, Latino, or Asian.

The Fillmore District was transfigured by so-called urban renewal efforts in the 1950s and 60s, and its historic jazz clubs have long since been replaced by posh retailers. The citys Black population has fallen from a peak of about 15 percent of the citys total, to just 5 percent. Valencia Street in the Mission has become a high-end shopping district, contributing to the 27 percent decline in the neighborhoods Latino population over the past decade. According to the Bay Area Atlas, 54 percent percent of low-income households of color live in neighborhoods being gentrified or at risk of gentrification.

The contraction of San Franciscos communities of color is not reflected in the citys jails, however. Although the citys population is just 5 percent Black and 40 percent white, the jail population is 48 percent Black and 40 percent white, according to the District Attorneys office. The majority of Welchs clients are people of color.

The communities that are most overwhelmed by our criminal legal system certainly should be supported in participating in the most important part of it, which is serving on a jury, says Welch. So many people are kind of disenfranchised from the ability to do it. Its often the very people who are going to be the best jurors, and have the best understanding of reality.

A study conducted by the The Racial Equity & Diversity Lab at Tufts University on group decision-making indicates diverse juries spend more time deliberating over the facts of a case than homogenous juries and are less likely to rely on bias. Thats an all-too-important endeavor when jurors come together to analyze someones life experiences, Welch says.

There are realities that many people confront that are just not on the radar of people of privilege, says Welch. We all come from different experiences. Understanding some of the challenges of somebody who lives in a much more challenging environment that you live in is really important. The relationship that somebody from a position of privilege might have with law enforcement is sometimes going to be dramatically different in a lot of cases from the experiences of a poor person or a person of color.

San Franciscos Be the Jury passed through the state Senate in late June and awaits Gov. Gavin Newsoms approval. If signed, the pilot program would go into effect in January and run until 2023. Its co-sponsors hope it will be a catalyst for state reform. But other reformers say paying low-income jurors for their time is just one piece of the puzzle.

THE SHALLOW POOL

Have you ever wondered how the courts track you down to issue your summons? At least once a year, each countys jury commissioner compiles a list of eligible jurors by randomly choosing from source lists. Under current state law, these indexes are compiled from the Department of Motor Vehicles and voter registrations. This means that only those who have a valid drivers licence or are registered to vote get their jury summons.

This selection process means millions of people, including many low-income people of color, are never asked to serve.

Beginning in January another new piece of state legislation, SB 592, also known as the Fair Juries Act, will expand those lists by requiring jury commissioners to add Franchise Tax Board records as sources for jurors. This means anyone who files income taxes will be added to the index. The goal of this bill, as authored by San Francisco Democrat Sen. Scott Wiener, is to broaden and diversify jury pools.

The state of California has, for decades, only used the Department of Motor Vehicles and voter registration to summon jurors, says Oscar Bobrow, chief deputy public defender in Solano County and a co-sponsor of the bill. When you only use those two lists, based on historical data, you get an under-representation.

One study, which surveyed 1,275 residents on a master list in Orange County, found that when both voter registration and DMV lists were used, African Americans were underrepresented by 18.92 percent relative to their population. Another study found that 41.3 percent of jury-eligible people in California are not on voter register lists; a disproportionate amount of individuals on that list are people of color.

Bobrow has been pushing for legislation to expand the jury summons lists since he was a deputy defender in Contra Costa county over a decade ago. Non-representative juries have long been prevalent in both counties.

Panels that are brought into the room are hugely disproportionately Caucasian, he says. You get a panel of 100 people and you see two people of color in the room on a regular basis. It precludes people from getting a fair cross section.

He says that prior to the legislation, the states Supreme Court had acknowledged on more than one occasion that the juries in his county are not representative, but that this has been ruled non-intentional. While it may not have been intentional, he says, something needed to change.

Although at least 17 other states already use tax filers to select jurors, according to the California Public Defenders Office, Bobrow says the legislation took years to gain traction in the Golden State.

Bobrow believes, at least in part, that may be due to the fact that failed legislative attempts included clauses for collecting data on jury demographics. He says California Jury Commissioners will not collect this kind of information, which is both perplexing and frustrating for himself and others trying to ensure jury pools are reflective of their counties.

In 2017, Weiner had proposed SB 576. The bill would have required jury commissioners to issue a short questionnaire detailing a jurors race, gender, ethnicity and ZIP code. That bill died in 2018.

This was part of what we pushed for in legislation and we get shut down every time. Jury commissioners dont collect it, they dont care. Jury commissioners are, by statute in the state of California, required to tell the judges that they work for whether or not they are getting a fair cross section with the community, says Bobrow. How do you know whether youre getting a fair cross section if youre not collecting data on whos showing up?

Despite a constitutional mandate that jury pools in the United States need to be representative of their population, almost no data exists in California that can prove juries are living up to the rule.

Bobrow says the few states that do collect this kind of information, such as New York, are able to identify areas where more juror outreach should be conducted.

In 2010, New York Gov. David Patterson signed the Jury Pool Fair Representation Act. The act allows commissioners to collect and assemble race and other demographic data into an annual report designed to address the underrepresentation of minorities on New York juries.

The law had also expanded New Yorks source lists of prospective jurors from DMV and voter registration lists to include payers of income and property taxes, students receiving financial aid, senior citizens subject to rent increase exemptions, recipients of workers compensation, public housing residents, and people subscribing to certain utility services.

They collect the data and they have a report every year. It says, These are the number of people that are summoned and this is a percentage of that population that is African American, Hispanic, Asian, says Borbow, New York has expanded the roles of who they summon. They use at least four lists, and they merge and purge duplicate names, and they have a way more diverse population of people that show up.

Without data on juror demographics, Bobrow says it will be difficult to identify the means by which California can also expand its potential juror lists. But still, hes eager to see Californias new legislation come into play.

Hopefully we will be able to see more diverse panels showing up for service in all the courts in the state, says Bobrow. With the expansion of this new list as well as the legislation that passed the year before, the inclusion of people that have had prior felony convictions.

FORMER FELONS

James Binnall was a year into his career as a San Diego criminal defender in 2009 when he was summoned for jury service. He walked through the attorneys only entrance of the court and into the jury room, where he proceeded to fill out a potential juror questionnaire.

When one of the routine questions asked if he had ever been convicted of a felony, Binnall checked yes.

In 1999, Binnall caused a DUI car accident that claimed the life of his best friend in the passenger seat. He served more than four years in a maximum security prison in Pennsylvania. During that time, he became passionate about the law and took his first LSAT behind bars. Six months after his release, he enrolled in the Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. He graduated in 2007, the same week his parole was set to expire.

It was Binnalls first time being summoned for service in California since he passed the bar in 2008. And it wasnt until that day, moments later when he was dismissed from the court, that he learned his prior felony conviction meant he couldnt serve on a jury.

It was ironic to me and sort of hypocritical, says Binnall. You could go through the entire sort of vetting process for becoming an attorney and then also be summarily dismissed from jury service because they assume that because you have committed a felony that youre just unfit to serve.

Thus began Binnalls decade-long project of researching and advocating for felons rights. His work was highly influential in the passing of California Senate Bill 310. The bill, authored by Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, restored the right to serve on a jury for people with past felony convictions who are not under state supervision or have a sexual violence record. Before January, anyone with a former felony conviction was barred for life from the juror box.

SB 310 was so crucial. Its needed in California, in terms of the size of California, the diversity of California, and the size of the criminal justice system. It impacted a ton of people, says Binnall, now an associate professor of law, and criminal justice at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of Twenty Million Angry Men: The Case for Including Convicted Felons in Our Jury System. Folks who were excluded missed out on this entire civic experience.

The legislation was passed in the wake of a broader ongoing discussion surrounding rights of those with criminal conviction records. Between 2016 and 2020, at least 13 states had expanded the right to vote for people with felony convictions, allowing millions of individuals once barred from that civic practice to join in democracy. California has allowed former felons who are not under state supervision to vote since 1974.

When Newsom signed SB 310 in 2019, More than 20 other states, including Colorado, Illinois, and Maine, had already allowed people with past felony convictions to serve on juries, although restrictions on people under state supervision and the type of crime vary per state. Over 20 states continue to permanently deny anyone with a prior felony conviction.

Resistance in allowing former felons to serve on juries was, and still is, palpable across the United States, says Binnall. Attempts in 2019 to pass bills to allow convicted felons to serve on juries recently failed in New York and Louisiana.

When it comes to folks with convictions across the country this is a very pervasive exclusion, far more so than voting, says Binnall. And obviously, this has a dispatrive impact on racial minorities because they are overrepresented in our criminal justice system.

According to his research, an estimated 19 million Americans have felony convictions. Of that group, nearly 7 million were African American, despite comprising 13 percent of the U.S. population. Nationwide, approximately one-third of African American men have felony convictions.

Even after Californias bill went into effect this year, Binnall noticed a prevalent issue: How would people with past felony convictions know they were now eligible to serve on a jury?

Months after the law went into effect, Binnall studied how each county in California was sounding the alarm bell to their former felons. He learned that 22 of 58 counties provided misleading, incorrect or insufficient information about eligibility. He says that only one county, to his knowledge, had a mechanism for getting former felons back on those potential jury lists if they had been removed.

Notification is crucially important if we want this legislation to have any effect at all on making jury pools more diverse, says Binnall, adding that legislation was implemented to ensure notification to former felons regarding their right to vote in California. Jury service, he says, should be held to the same standard.

But Binnall has high hopes in activism for the rights of felons. Nearly 60 percent of Californians who voted in the 2020 election supported Prop 17, which extended voting rights to people with felonies who are under state supervision, lifting the disenfranchisement of an estimated 50,000 people.

I think now that Prop 17 passed with respect to folks on supervision who could vote, it sort of undercuts the carve out for the jury system and its role. If folks are responsible enough to vote when theyre on supervision, why are they not responsible enough to serve, or at least to be put into the jury pool when theyre on supervision? says Binnall. I think thats the next step in the evolution of this.

BIAS BOX

Even if these legislative measures accomplish the goal of a broader, more representative jury pool, they still fail to address a major component in the lack of diverse juries around the nation: how ingrained racism, whether intentional or unconscious, continues to infect juror selection.

Beginning next year, the final step of the juror selection process known as voir dire will undergo major reform in California. In September 2020, Newsom signed AB 3070, the Anti-Discrimination Jury Selection Act. The bill will amend an existing law said to enable wide-spread discrimination in jury selection.

During voir dire, judges and prosecutors question the background of potential jurors for biases. Since the dawn of modern criminal cases, lawyers have been allowed to exclude a certain number of jurors without stating reason by issuing a peremptory challenge, also known as a peremptory strike.

These strikes are intended to exclude jurors who may have bias that would impede their ability to have an impartial view on the facts of a case. Intentional discrimination in these strikes is against the law both the California Supreme Court in 1978 and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986 issued rulings, known together as Batson, against using race as the only reason to strike a prospective juror.

But a growing number of states, including California, have begun to acknowledge that what happens in the name of impartiality often disgueses discrimination.

A highly influential study led by UC Berkeley law professors and students set out to prove what was witnessed for quite some time. The study, Whitewashing the Jury Box: How California Perpetuates the Discriminatory Exclusion of Black and Latinx Jurors, analyzed almost 700 cases in which the California Courts of Appeal heard objections to peremptory challenges from 2006 to 2018. They found prosecutors tried to remove Black jurors nearly 75 percent of the time and Latinx jurors almost 28 percent of the time. Potential white jurors accounted for just 1 percent of these peremptory challenges.

This is a process of exclusion that goes back to the very moment that this country allowed Black people to exercise the right to sit as jurors, says Elisabeth Semel, director of the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic and co-author of the study. This is a long, long history. I came into this story as a lawyer in the mid 1970s and saw what other people had seen for generations.

Under current law, prosecutors who are challenged under Batson for removing a juror must state race-neutral reasoning. But Semel says stereotypes, often correlated with race, have been consistently used to justify striking jurors for decades.

Her study revealed prosecutors in these cases successfully argued their peremptory challenges against African Americans because they had dreadlocks, were slouching, wore a short skirt and blinged out sandals, visited family members who were incarcerated, had negative experiences with law enforcement. The report also found prosecutors had kicked potential jurors solely because they lived in East Oakland, Los Angeles Countys Compton, or San Franciscos Tenderloin.

Judges rarely find that these kinds of answers constitute intentional racism, she says. In the last 30 years, the California Supreme has reviewed 142 cases with discrimination claims yet found just three violations.

This new legislation takes a deeper approach. Prosecutors who are challenged under Batson will now have to provide clear and convincing evidence that their strikes werent related to an individuals protected group, such as race or class. And AB 3070 goes as far as to provide a list of presumptively invalid reasons to exclude jurors, which are based on the findings in Semels report that are often used to strike people of color.

A jurors clothing, demeanor, employment status or neighborhood will no longer be a pretext for dismissal without grounds that these factors will hinder the impartiality of a juror. And notably, Semel says, expressing distrust in the criminal legal system or admitting to a negative experience with law enforcement is high on that list.

Its meant to address discrimination in a realistc way, Semel says. Much of discrimination is not purposeful or concious but it is the result of stereotypical thinking. It is intended to greatly reduce the reliance on stereotypes.

This kind of progressive reform to a long held practice has not gone unchallenged, she says. Both the Alliance of California Judges and the Association of Deputy District Attorneys criticized the report and the legislation that followed, saying this new process is unworkable and will undoubtedly make the juror selection process longer and more difficult.

But to Semel and advocates around the state, its necessary. For too long, the jury system around the nation has been biased against minorities, she says. Furthermore, Semel contends it is the legislatures mandate to ensure fairness to communities in their right to serve and the trustworthiness, efficacy, and morality of the justice system hinges upon this effort.

It matters to the integrity of the system, she says of initiatives like Be the Jury and AB 3070. It matters to peoples willingness to serve and peoples belief that the system actually is doing justice, as opposed to just chewing people up and spitting them out.

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Balancing the Scales of Justice - SF Weekly

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About BIONIC:

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Excerpt from:

Incase Expands BIONIC Collection of Sustainable Carry Accessories | Shop-Eat-Surf - Shop-Eat-Surf.com

Its an especially immediate problem in 2021, but it has much deeper consequences than just the vaccination campaign. Consider some recent anecdotal examples Ive witnessed recently: A colleague praised a student for convincingly espousing a conservative perspective in classroom discussion, when the student himself obviously didnt hold that view. A second colleague noted in lecture, with properly distanced intonation: What would you say to a conservative, who might respond .

The implicit presumption in both conversations was clear, and likely correct: No one was actually present who held those conservative viewsor, really, to know that they were being accurately captured at all.

The overall academic world has always leaned liberal, but even in that context, the political imbalance within social work and public health is striking. In a 2018 survey of public health scholars in the Society for Epidemiologic Research, 72.4 percent reported their politics as liberal/left-leaning. Less than 5% responded: conservative/right-leaning. A 2014 analysis of one social work program found that 9.4% of students identified as Republican; 55.9% identified as Democrats.

In many fields, not just mine, conservative estrangement from our professional and academic communities damages discourse on both sides of the partisan divide. In public health, particularly, it hurts the credibility and cultural competence we need to do our jobs across vast swathes of America. In our political conversation, it deepens the moral and intellectual decline of American conservatism itselfa palpable decline exemplified and worsened by the Trump presidency.

The partisan wonk gap provides fodder for jokes on social media. The gap is real, though, and its not funny. And it hurts conservative priorities as well as liberal ones.

In early 2017, I attended a health policy dinner with Democratic and Republican House members. In casual conversation, it was obvious that Democrats were connected with a cadre of health policy professionals. Republicans were not. Soon after, House Republicans passed a conspicuously shoddy bill to repeal and replace Obamacarea bill that was supposedly the Congresss first priority under a Republican president. The bill had so many basic flawsincluding a nearly $13,000 proposed increase in yearly health insurance premiums for low-income 64-year-oldsthat it politically self-immolated once it faced real scrutiny.

That same estrangement enables palpable absolutism and lazy groupthink among progressives. Many of our students do not havemay never have hadthe experience of being openly challenged by conservative peers in our classrooms.

I fear that many struggle to distinguish truly unworthy arguments presented by some conservativessay, prevarication about climate change, or denying the Republican Partys long history of voter suppression and appeals to white racismfrom more worthy and serious arguments presented by conservatives that everyone should learn from and address.

For decades, for instance, conservatives and libertarians argued that public employee unions wield excessive influence on state and local governments. It should not have taken front-page police misconduct cases, union opposition to evidence-based vaccine mandates, or my own states seriously unfunded pension liabilities, for progressives to see merit in these views.

I dont write these words as a conservative attacking supposed evils of cancel culture. I dont write as a conservative at all. Im an emphatic liberal Democrat. Over my career, I have witnessed many harms inflicted by conservatives opposition to syringe exchanges and other essential public health efforts most definitely including our current public health crisis. Angered by such memories, ensconced within a community of like-minded scholars, I might forget that liberal/left communities are collections of imperfect humans like any otherwith our own blind spots and biases arising from group conformity. Progressive academia often lacks sufficient voices in the room to call us on our errors. John Stuart Mill reminds us: Those who know only their own side of the argument know little of that.

Conservative fears about job discrimination strike me as understandable, too. Imagine two job candidates, Martin and Michael. Martin finds that cultural norms among recent immigrants promote upward mobility, and that the role of structural barriers to block that mobility is overstatedchallenging the consensus in his field. Michael conducts an analysis of equally high quality, but finds the opposite result. Or imagine Lynne and Laurie. They conduct essentially identical statistical analysis of mandatory minimum sentences for illegal gun possession in 43 jurisdictions, Lynne finds that mandatory minimums reduce gun crime by 4 percent, and concludes that such policies are valuable. Laurie finds that mandatory minimums have zero impact on gun crime, and that such policies exemplify mass incarceration as a futile strategy that fails to address structural causes of crime.

I suspect that Michael and Laurie would have an easier job talk at many schools, because they come bearing findings more congenial to the liberal professors in the room. Martin and Lynne might have narrower margins for methodological judgment calls or presentation stumbles. They would face the additional burden of addressing the (potentially quite real) danger that their findings will be used by political figures who do not wish minority communities well. If the issue were truly sensitivesay the efficacy of affirmative action, the comparative successes of charter schools for minority and low-income students, or the unintended consequences of Ban the Box policies barring employers from inquiring about criminal convictionsId be even more worried that someone would face a competitive disadvantage because of her views, or her substantive findings.

We should be open and intentional in addressing these concerns, and in guarding against our own group-think and biases.

What can universities and other institutions do? Targeted student outreach would definitely be wise, particularly toward conservative rural communities where students might be very socially engaged, but might not be considering graduate study or PhD-level research. As with other forms of outreach, this requires thoughtful, culturally competent engagement on the part of universities hoping to broaden their student bodies.

Ive also come to support a radical policy with obvious ironies: We should practice affirmative action for religious, social and economic conservatives in areas of academia where those holding these views are scarce. If someone applies to our school who was (say) president of University of Texas Students for LifeI want her in my classroom. I want progressive students to present, defend, refine and improve their arguments knowing that a peer who disagrees with them is right there, ready to engage. Of course, I want conservative students to have the same experience, learning from their peers, ready to defend, refine and improve their own views.

Targeted outreach to conservative groups, to communities and campuses where conservative views are common, would be useful tools to address this challenge. So would admission preferences to promote viewpoint diversity. Yes, there are plenty of awkward ironies here across the usual political lines. And for a million reasons, conservatives may always be scarcer in public health and social work than in the corporate sector. Still, we can do better. Countless American conservatives honor, through their lives and service, values of compassion, self-sacrifice and inclusion dear to liberals; they care about exactly the same issues that draw people into public health and social-service professions.

George W. Bush saved millions of lives around the world through the Presidents Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)a program we might well emulate in vaccinating the world against Covid; liberal students would be well-served by appreciating the impact of the Christian conservatives who helped drive the effort. And a conservative student in our programs would meet countless residents of Chicagos South Side who identify with the political left, and who honor, through their own lives and service, values of entrepreneurship, faith-based service and personal responsibility dear to conservatives.

We can learn from each other, honor and challenge each other, across partisan and ideological divides. To do this, we need both sides routinely present on our faculties and in our classrooms. Thats not the reality right now. We must fix that.

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Opinion | Why Public Health Experts Arent Reaching Conservatives on Covid - POLITICO