“The professional standards office also raised red flags about statistics showing troopers used police dogs disproportionately on black motorists, a trend that ‘has increased steadily for the last two reporting periods.’”
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NJ.com, Aug. 25, 2013
By Christopher Baxter
TRENTON — Troopers patrolling New Jersey’s highways are breaking State Police rules at a “troubling” rate, and supervisors are not doing enough to catch the mistakes and fix them, according to a new report by the state Attorney General’s Office.
The report, which covered the first half of 2012, found the State Police failed to identify mistakes by troopers ranging from excessive force to improper vehicle searches in nearly a third of the 155 stops they were required to examine.
That shortcoming was made worse by the fact that the Attorney General’s Office recently allowed State Police supervisors to review fewer stops overall, with the caveat that they do a thorough job analyzing them.
“This is a very disturbing report,” said Samuel Walker, a national expert on police reforms who consulted for the federal government during its oversight of the State Police. “By the time you reach 30 percent, that’s getting pretty serious.”
The report also cited the State Police for using police dogs on a disproportionate number of black drivers, for not issuing Miranda warnings to suspects and for failing to properly activate and store recordings from patrol car cameras.
The findings were released online last month by the Office of Law Enforcement Professional Standards, which was created to ensure the State Police followed its own rules after federal authorities stopped monitoring the division in 2009.
The sampling of traffic stops reviewed by State Police and the professional standards office were only a fraction of the more than 400,000 made by troopers each year, and the division’s examination is designed only to suggest areas of misconduct or improper procedures that need attention.
Though the report said the majority of troopers play by the rules, it noted a “troubling trend of increasing numbers of errors made during motor vehicle stops” even though the office repeatedly raised concerns about the problems over the past several years.
“The fact that OLEPS was able to note 46 stops with an error not caught out of the stops that the State Police did review, is troubling,” according to the report. “The State Police need to employ more detailed reviews and properly note all errors.”
Leland Moore, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, which oversees the State Police as well as the professional standards office, said in a statement the majority of the report’s concerns could be addressed with better training.
“The State Police continues to do an excellent job of protecting New Jersey citizens while ensuring overall, continued compliance with the various monitoring standards and criteria,” Moore said.He also said disagreements over troopers’ use of force were in part due to differences in interpretation.
A spokesman for the State Police, Lt. Stephen Jones, said the division will act in response to the report, but gave no specific examples of what was being done to eliminate the problems identified.
“The OLEPS report is not the end of the review process,” Jones said. “We answer those findings and refine our processes based on them. It’s the checks and balances designed in this system that allow for improvement.”
He added that the office has “unfettered access” to the State Police.
“Their job is finding areas for improvement, and ours is making those improvements,” he said.
Use of force
Among the problems, the oversight report said, were three instances in which troopers used force against motorists. The State Police reviewed the incidents and said the force was appropriate, but the office disagreed and investigations were opened.
The report said the office was unable to determine if force used in four other instances was appropriate because they took place outside the view of dashboard cameras mounted in the trooper patrol cars on the scene.
Dashboard recordings continued to be a problem, the report said, because many cruisers had incomplete audio or video. The office was unable to examine 51 stops — about 15 percent of those reviewed — because of “missing or unavailable” recordings.
The recordings, which were required as part of federal oversight, are critical to defend troopers from false claims in court and to protect the public from trooper misconduct such as excessive force.
The professional standards office also raised red flags about statistics showing troopers used police dogs disproportionately on black motorists, a trend that “has increased steadily for the last two reporting periods.”
“White drivers made up 48 percent of all stops, yet only 30 percent of motor vehicle stops with canine deployments,” the report said. “Black drivers made up 39 percent of all stops and 61 percent of canine deployments.”
The report stopped short of accusing troopers of bias, and noted all the canine deployments were appropriate.
Miranda violations
The report also sounded an alarm about the 49 instances in which troopers made an arrest but failed to inform suspects of their Miranda rights, which can lead to lawsuits against the state and increased legal costs for taxpayers.
“Not only are these violations occurring in stops without supervisory review, they are occurring in stops with supervisory review and not being noted or leading to interventions,” the report said.
The problem with Miranda warnings dates to a 2009 state Supreme Court ruling that tightened standards for vehicle searches. But despite subsequent training for troopers on the new rules, the problem persists, the report said.
“The State Police may want to conduct random reviews of stops with arrests to determine the extent of the Miranda issue,” the report said.
‘Considerable progress’
Wayne Fisher, a professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, said that while it may seem the State Police are making a lot of mistakes, many of the problems are related to paperwork or other things that should not raise much alarm.
“There are some shortcomings in some specific areas, but I think taken in total, this report is further evidence that the State Police have made considerable progress,” Fisher said.
But Alex Shalom, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said the true test of the professional standards office will be if it has the will and ability to force the State Police to improve.
“In any police department, you’re going to see failings by troopers,” said Shalom. “The question is, what are supervisors doing to remedy it? This report suggests they’re not doing enough.”

Labor Notes, Aug. 22, 2013
This summer marks 50 years since 1963’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew more than 200,000 people. But after the latest one-two punch—George Zimmerman walking free after killing Trayvon Martin, and the Supreme Court rolling back the Voting Rights Act—the new March on Washington August 24 is clearly needed to renew the struggle. (Get on board here.)
A fascinating new book from historian William P. Jones puts the 1963 action in its organizing context. Every U.S. school child learns the opening words of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but how many are taught that the march was the brainchild of the nation’s leading black labor activists—and called not only for an end to prejudice, but also for a federal jobs program, equality at work, and a boost to the minimum wage?
Black unionists organized through the 1950s against discrimination in hiring, on the job, and in unions. After a 1959 convention vote reaffirmed that the AFL-CIO would tolerate segregated locals, A. Philip Randolph (the “dean” of black unionists and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and others founded the Negro American Labor Council to organize black workers.
Randolph predicted, if racist trends persisted in unions and apprenticeships, a “forgotten slum proletariat in the black ghettoes of the great metropolitan centers of the country, existing within the grey shadows of a hopeless hope.”
At the NALC’s 1960 founding convention, women unionists protested an all-male board and won two seats. Local chapters sprang up across the country, and the group kept pressing the AFL-CIO to tackle both civil rights and black workers’ access to better jobs. —Eds.
By William P. Jones
In January 1963 A. Philip Randolph asked his old friend Bayard Rustin, who was working for the left-wing War Resisters League, to prepare a proposal that could win support from civil rights and labor leaders for a “mass descent” on the nation’s capital….
Rustin delivered a three-page memorandum outlining an ambitious campaign to draw attention to “the economic subordination of the Negro,” create “more jobs for all Americans,” and advance a “broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”
Their plan centered on a massive lobbying campaign, in which 100,000 people would shut down Congress for one day while presenting legislators and the president with their legislative demands, followed the next day by a “mass protest rally.”
Randolph liked the idea, and the NALC vice presidents approved it on March 23. By then the plan had expanded to include a mass march from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, where they hoped that President Kennedy would address the crowd….
Although southern activists [such as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s SCLC and the student group SNCC] had been focused on campaigns in Alabama and Mississippi, their attention shifted to Washington after the Kennedy administration refused to intervene against flagrant violations of federal authority in the South….
King scolded the administration for allowing Alabama governor George Wallace to defy a federal court order requiring him to admit three black students to the state university.
KING JOINS
“In his broadest attack to date on President Kennedy’s civil rights record,” the New York Times reported, King warned that the SCLC and other groups were prepared to organize “a march on Washington, even sit-ins in Congress” to force the federal government into action.
Recognizing an opportunity to coordinate with the southern movement, Anna Arnold Hedgeman set up a meeting where Randolph and King resolved to march under the slogan “For Jobs and Freedom.” They soon won support from John Lewis, who had been elected chairman of SNCC, as well as James Farmer of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]….
Recognizing that the March on Washington would take place even without their participation, and assured that the demonstration would be as peaceful and orderly as the June 23, 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League finally came on board.
With leaders of the NALC, SCLC, CORE, and SNCC, they met in New York on July 2 and pledged to mobilize local chapters of their respective organizations to bring their membership to Washington on August 28, the eighth anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder.
100,000 FOR $65,000
Bayard Rustin presented a detailed set of demands for the demonstration, including a federal jobs creation program, raising the minimum wage, a Fair Employment Practice law, and support for Kennedy’s civil rights bill. He anticipated that they could get 100,000 people to participate and estimated that the event would cost $65,000….
Historians have marveled at Rustin’s ability to build the march “out of nothing” in less than two months, but that assessment overlooks the rich organizational networks that he built upon.
Cleveland Robinson and L. Joseph Overton [both of District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union] asked trade unionists to establish local organizing committees in cities where they had influence, and CORE’s Norman Hill spent July and August travelling across the country to coordinate their efforts.
Roy Wilkins wrote to every NAACP branch, youth council, and state conference asking them to organize “no less than 100,000” people to participate in the March, and he dispatched NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill to help them do that.
Anna Hedgeman was charged with reaching out to religious groups. She took particular pride in recruiting white Christians from the South who “feel concern but have all too little opportunity to express it in their home place,” stating that the March would give them a chance to meet “white allies” from other regions while also demonstrating that African Americans were not completely alone in the South.
She also convinced the National Council of Churches to hold its annual convention in Washington the week of August 28 and encourage its 80,000 members to attend the March….
The American Jewish Congress and the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice endorsed the March on Washington, along with 17 international unions, several state and municipal labor councils, and the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO.
By the end of July, Rustin reported that local organizing committees had chartered 2,000 buses, 21 trains, and 10 airplanes—enough to carry 115,000 marchers to Washington.
AFL-CIO SITS IT OUT
The one major liberal body that rebuffed Randolph’s request for support was George Meany’s AFL-CIO, but by that point the March was clearly prepared to move forward without it.
Randolph and UAW President Walter Reuther pushed for the endorsement at a meeting of the executive council just two weeks before the March, but met resistance from union leaders who feared “that there would be disorder, that people would get hurt, and that it would build up resentment in Congress.”
Some pushed for outright rejection of the March, but President George Meany negotiated a compromise that expressed support for its goals and allowed affiliated unions to participate but withheld an official endorsement from the federation itself.
Excerpted from The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights, by William P. Jones. Copyright © 2013 by William P. Jones. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

N.Y. Times, Aug.23, 2013
By Charles M. Blow
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I have a gnawing in my gut, an uneasy sense of society and its racial reality.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech keeps ringing in my head, an aching, idyllic, rhetorical masterpiece that envisions a future free of discrimination and filled with harmony and equality. But I wonder whether the day he imagined will ever come and whether many Americans have quietly abandoned King’s dream as a vision that can’t — or shouldn’t — exist in reality.
I’m absolutely convinced that enormous steps have been made in race relations. That’s not debatable. Most laws that explicitly codified discrimination have been stricken from the books. Overt, articulated racial animus has become more socially unacceptable. And diversity has become a cause to be championed in many quarters, even if efforts to achieve it have taken some hits of late.
But my worry is that we have hit a ceiling of sorts. As we get closer to a society where explicit bias is virtually eradicated, we no longer have the stomach to deal with the more sinister issues of implicit biases and of structural and systematic racial inequality.
I worry that centuries of majority privilege and minority disenfranchisement are being overlooked in puddle-deep discussions about race and inequality, personal responsibility and societal inhibitors.
I wonder if we, as a society of increasing diversity but also drastic inequality, even agree on what constitutes equality. When we hear that word, do we think of equal opportunity, or equal treatment under the law, or equal outcomes, or some combination of those factors?
And I worry that there is a distinct and ever-more-vocal weariness — and in some cases, outright hostility — about the continued focus on racial equality.
In this topsy-turvy world, those who even deign to raise the issue of racial inequality can be quickly dismissed as race-baiters or, worse, as actual racists. It’s the willful-ignorance-is-bliss approach to dismissing undesirable discussion.
In this moment, blacks and whites see the racial progress so differently that it feels as if we are living in two separate Americas.
According to a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday, nearly twice as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly by the police. More than twice as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly by the courts. And about three times as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly than whites at work, in stores or restaurants, in public schools and by the health care system.
In fact, a 2011 study by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School found, “Whites believe that they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America.”
And in these divergent realities, we appear to be resegregating — moving in the opposite direction of King’s dream.
The Great Migration — in which millions of African-Americans in the 20th century, in two waves, left the rural South for big cities in the North, Midwest and West Coast — seems to have become a failed experiment, with many blacks reversing those migratory patterns and either moving back to the South or out of the cities.
As USA Today reported in 2011:
“2010 census data released so far this year show that 20 of the 25 cities that have at least 250,000 people and a 20 percent black population either lost more blacks or gained fewer in the past decade than during the 1990s. The declines happened in some traditional black strongholds: Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland and St. Louis.”
In addition, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this month found that “about 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of nonwhite Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race.”
Furthermore, there is some evidence that our schools are becoming more segregated, not less. A study this year by Dana Thompson Dorsey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that “students are more racially segregated in schools today than they were in the late 1960s and prior to the enforcement of court-ordered desegregation in school districts across the country.”
I want to celebrate our progress, but I’m too disturbed by the setbacks.
I had hoped to write a hopeful, uplifting column to mark this anniversary. I wanted to be happily lost in The Dream. Instead, I must face this dawning reality.

N.Y. Times, Aug. 21, 2013
By Kenneth Prewitt
Starting in 1790, and every 10 years since, the census has reported the American population into distinct racial groups. Remarkably, a discredited relic of 18th-century science, the “five races of mankind,” lives on in the 21st century. Today, the census calls these five races white; black; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.
The nation’s founders put a hierarchical racial classification to political use: its premise of white supremacy justified, among other things, enslaving Africans, violent removal of Native Americans from their land, the colonization of Caribbean and Pacific islands, Jim Crow subjugation and the importation of cheap labor from China and Mexico.
Of course, officially sanctioned discrimination was finally outlawed by civil rights legislation in 1964. The underlying demographic categories, however, were kept. Securing civil rights required statistics. Thus resulted an uneasy marriage of preposterous 18th-century racial classifications to legitimate 20th-century policy goals like fair electoral representation, anti-discrimination programs, school desegregation, bilingual education and affirmative action.
But the demographic revolution since the immigration overhaul of 1965 has pushed the outdated (and politically constructed) notion of race to the breaking point. In June the Supreme Court struck down a core provision of the Voting Rights Act, taking note of changing demographics. I disagree with the court’s ruling, but agree that society is changing. And our statistics must reflect those changes.
Fast-growing population groups — mixed-race Americans, those with “hyphenated” identities, immigrants and their children, anyone under 30 — increasingly complain that the choices offered by the census are too limited, even ludicrous. Particularly tortured is the Census Bureau’s designation, since 1970, of “Hispanic” as an ethnicity or origin, thereby compelling Hispanics to also choose a “race.” In 2010, Hispanics were offered the option to select more than one race, but 37 percent opted for “some other race” — a telling indicator that the term itself is the problem.
Indeed, anyone who filled in “some other race” that year was allocated to one or more of the five main groupings. Many absurdities have resulted.
America has about 1.5 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa — some 3 percent of the nation’s black population. Like President Obama’s father, who was Kenyan, their experience differs vastly from that of African-Americans whose ancestors were enslaved, yet they are subsumed into the same category — one that, until this very year, continued to include the outdated term “Negro.”
The census considers Arabs white, along with non-Arabs like Turks and Kurds because they have origins in the Middle East or North Africa. Migrants from the former Soviet nations in Central Asia are lumped in as white along with descendants of New England pilgrims.
An indigenous person from Peru, Bolivia or Guatemala is Hispanic, but if she “maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment,” she might also be counted as part of a racial group that includes the Inupiat and Yupik peoples of Alaska.
Are Australian immigrants whites or Pacific Islanders? (The Census Bureau’s own documents are unclear on this.)
The census has no second-generation question, leaving Congress to debate immigration reform with inadequate statistics about which new Americans are learning English, finishing school, living in segregated neighborhoods or staying out of jail. Social scientists closely track intermarriage as an indicator of assimilation, but the census reports intermarriage only among whites, blacks, Hispanics and others — overlooking unions between, say, Japanese and Chinese, Cubans and Mexicans, Nigerians and native-born blacks. These marriages may have as much to tell us about where the nation is headed as the rate at which whites intermarry.
Much attention has been paid to the news that non-Hispanic whites now account for less than half of births in the United States and that deaths now exceed births among non-Hispanic whites. These projections are oversimplified and misleading because they rely on the outdated “five races” concept. The far more significant turning point is the shift from a nation of a few large racial blocs into a hybrid America of numerous nationalities, ethnicities and cultures, unprecedented in human history. It is this hybrid, multivalent, dynamic America that is not reflected in the census. We cannot, however, fix this at the expense of abandoning racial categories, which are still needed for legitimate policy purposes.
The Census Bureau has begun to consider what changes it will recommend for the 2020 census. It will focus, appropriately, on operational improvements, like increasing response rates. But there are also political decisions to be made.
I urge three actions. First, drop the current race questions, which misleadingly conflate race and nationality, and ask two new questions: one based on a streamlined version of today’s ethnic and racial categories, and a separate, comprehensive nationality question. (The 2010 census asked Hispanics, Asians and Pacific Islanders to specify a national origin and allowed American Indians and Alaska Natives to put down their tribe.)
These two questions would allow for much-needed flexibility. Broad racial groupings are significant for protecting voting rights, but information on national origin is more useful for understanding health disparities in a metropolis, or for diversifying a university’s student body. Indeed, the failure to appreciate rising inequality within the country’s white majority and to distinguish, say, inner-city blacks from African asylum-seekers, or Southeast Asian refugees from well-educated East Asians, have contributed to the criticisms of affirmative action as too blunt a tool of social policy.
Second, add parental place of birth to the census. One-fourth of Americans under the age of 18 are children of immigrants — a proportion that will increase sharply over the next quarter-century.
Third, slowly phase in the use of the data to make policy. There is a precedent: in 2000, there was strong opposition to the new option of selecting more than one race. It was feared that this would reduce the size of various racial minorities. The government responded by counting those who are white and of one minority race as minorities for the purposes of civil-rights monitoring and enforcement. The new comprehensive statistics on national origin would be put to use judiciously. The five races would not disappear from the statistical system, but neither would they be the only policy tool available.
Americans may hope for a colorblind future, but we know that the legacy of discrimination continues to haunt us; that some new immigrants are assimilated even as others are left behind; that new versions of racism crop up, within as well as among the five “races.”
Faced with these empirical realities, statistical ignorance is a moral failure. It is also a political failure to ignore the arrival of a hybrid America. Even the questions on race we use in 2020 will be wrong for 2100. It will take decades of gradual re-engineering to match census statistics to demographic realities. The Census Bureau is prepared; what’s missing is public awareness and political leadership.
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Kenneth Prewitt, the director of the United States Census Bureau from 1998 to 2000, is a professor of public affairs at Columbia University and the author of “What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Effort to Classify Americans.”

Alternet, August 19, 2013
Attorney General Eric Holder promises reform of US criminal justice. For the kids of broken families, it can’t come soon enough
By Michael Leo Owens (The Guardian, UK)
Seeking to cut imprisonment rates and spending while protecting the public, Holder has directed the Justice Department to charge non-violent drug offenders with less severe federal crimes. Beyond reducing the use of mandatory minimum sentences and shortening prison times for lower-level drug felons, while reserving more serious charges and longer sentences for violent and higher-ranking drug traffickers, the Justice Department supports sentencing more people to rehab than (re-)imprisonment for crimes rooted in drug abuse and addiction.Reform criminal justice now. That was the core message US Attorney General Eric Holder delivered recently to the American Bar Associationand our nation. He declared that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason” and at great public expense.
Those reforms, among others, according to Holder, will do more for “the lives being harmed, not helped, by a criminal justice system that doesn’t serve the American people as well as it should”. There is one group of Americans that couldn’t agree more – the children of the imprisoned.
Most prisoners are parents of children under 18 years of age. Two-thirds of incarcerated parents are nonviolent offenders, often locked up on minor drug-related charges. They make up the majority of parents in prison, and they and their children are the ones criminal justice reform will most affect.
By the best estimates, about 2.7 million children under the age of 18 have a parent in prison or jail. According to sociologists Bruce Western and Becky Petit (pdf), that means one in 28 kids in the United States (as of 2010) has a mother or father, or both, in lockup – a dramatic change from the one in 125 rate a quarter of a century ago. Approximately one in nine black children have an imprisoned parent, four times as many 25 years ago. Furthermore, 14,000 or more children of the imprisoned annually enter foster care, while an undetermined number enter juvenile detention and adult prisons.
The losses children experience from of an imprisoned parent are many (pdf). While imprisoned, governments deprive parents of consistent contact and engagement with their children. Their kids rarely visit them in prison because these parents are often isolated at great distances from their communities. A sad example is the recent decision of the federal bureau of prisons to relocate their inmates to prisons scattered around the country, making visitation impossible for many.
Even phone calls become difficult and rare because of exorbitant telephone rates. Some imprisoned parents with long sentences may even permanently lose their parental rights.
The lack of parental contact and engagement during imprisonment hurts kids of the incarcerated, psychologically and socially. Many kids of the imprisoned are teased and taunted, shamed and stigmatized for the actions and absences of their parents. This is true even in communities with high rates of parental imprisonment.
Naturally, kids of the imprisoned try to hide the trauma of parental arrests, convictions, and incarceration. Some mask it. Others act out, resulting in school suspensions, dropouts, criminal arrests, and juvenile imprisonment, which maintains the “school-to-prison pipeline” that Attorney General Holder mentioned in his speech.
The children of the formerly incarcerated suffer, too. A collection of federal and state laws, for instance, bar mothers and fathers with drug felony convictions from federal social welfare programs, such as cash assistance for the poor, food stamps, vouchers for rental housing, apartments in public housing, and subsidized student loans for college educations. Some states prevent parents with felony convictions from voting and ban them from obtaining employment licenses for jobs like truck drivers and barbers.
These and other collateral consequences, as Attorney General Holder knows and his Justice Department is trying to change, weaken families after their reunification with the formerly incarcerated, and hinder parents from being better guardians and role models of their children. The post-prison sanctions also create what sociologist Christopher Wildeman suggests is “a new mechanism through which race and class inequality grow”.
Philanthropic organizations like the Annie E Casey Foundation in Baltimore and community improvement organizations such as Foreverfamily in Atlanta stand up for and with the children of imprisoned parents: they are part of a nascent but growing movement toward change. Their compassion and courage for kids of the imprisoned is commendable. But the children of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated need more – not just private charity, but public support, too.
Transforming the lives of the children of the imprisoned requires that far more Americans learn of, talk about, and act for the kids who are most likely the truly disadvantaged of all our nation’s children. Making the issue a common subject of public conversation will aid this transformation. And popular culture can be a powerful tool.
Earlier this summer, for example, the Children’s Television Workshop, producers of “Sesame Street”, introduced Alex, a Muppet with an imprisoned father. Schools, counselors, and therapists received copies of the video. Its existence and media coverage pushed the issue briefly into the spotlight. Portions of the video and facts about the issue should become part of regular “Sesame Street” programming and other popular shows about children and families.
We can also aid the transformation by giving voice to and advocating for children of the imprisoned. Criminal justice and welfare policymakers need to feel pressure that the needs of kids of the imprisoned are important. Celebrities, who during their youth and teens had imprisoned parents, can help, speaking up – as Laura Kaeppeler, a former Miss America, has done.
The “war on drugs” and mass incarceration policies have failed our criminal justice system at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of ruined lives. They have also created a disastrous de facto child welfare policy, harming those Americans least able to advocate for themselves, our children, and undermining families and communities. Let’s make America’s kids a top priority of Holder’s reforms.

Colorlines, Aug. 21, 2013
BY DANI MCCLAIN
Curtis Hierro speaks into the phone like he’s talking into a bullhorn. The passion the 26-year-old Dream Defenders field director has used to get himself and fellow occupiers through more than four weeks in the Florida statehouse is evident in his voice. He’s ready for their 30th (and what will turn out to be their final) night there, despite an announcement that the state will test the building’s fire alarms from 8 pm to midnight. That’ll make it hard to get a moment’s peace, let alone sleep. But Hierro takes it in stride, as he did when the "Star Wars" theme went blaring at dawn, the weekends when getting access to a shower was tough, and other challenges that make putting one’s body on the line to achieve a political goal a test of endurance.
"That’s expected in this work, and we’ve made sure that everyone who comes in this space knows our norms and that we’re nonviolent," Hierro said. "They’re trying to provoke us so they can discredit us and kick us out."
Since July 16 — three days after the George Zimmerman verdict was announced — Hierro and between a dozen and 60 other Dream Defenders had camped out in Gov. Rick Scott’s office, demanding a special legislative session and the consideration of Trayvon’s Law, a bill crafted in collaboration with state legislators and the NAACP. The young Floridians are using the direct action tactics its founders honed in a previous takeover of the statehouse and in a march they organized after Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in an effort to turn this post-verdict moment into a movement.
In doing so, they joined others around the country who are turning to civil disobedience and strategic protest as a way to force change, or at least create the conditions for a new conversation about issues ranging from racial profiling to the [youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=fSFSSsURE7g], workers’ rights, long term solitary confinement and immigration policy. A spirit similar to the one that motivated 250,000 people to converge on Washington, D.C. 50 years ago this month is moving today. And much of that spirit is being harnessed and directed by millennials.
Young people are filling a role they’ve held in organizing throughout history, says Cathy Cohen, a University of Chicago political science professor and founder and director of the Black Youth Project. The students who led sit-ins at lunch counters and boarded buses to challenge segregation were part of that vanguard during the civil rights era. Today’s organizers who use direct action, from the Dream Defenders to the Dream 9, are part of that legacy.
"Young people don’t always have to think about mortgages and jobs and childcare and are freer to engage in a certain kind of risk that as you get older you’re less likely to get involved in," Cohen says.
People in their 20s and early 30s also backed Barack Obama by more than a two-to-one ratio in 2008, and now they’re frustrated by the pace of progress through institutional channels. But if North Carolina is any indication, that frustration hasn’t led them to stop believing in the power of the ballot box. Young people wereat the forefront of some of the Moral Mondays demonstrations there, particularly those that called out the state GOP’s efforts to restrict access to the polls through a new law that requires photo ID, shortens the early voting period and ends the same-day registration option. More than 900 North Carolinians were arrested during the 13 weeks that Moral Mondays protests took place at the Raleigh statehouse, drawing attention to conservative attacks on abortion rights, wages and jobs. The intergenerational group of protestors had a clear effect, and approval ratings for the Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature are down.
Black Youth Project’s Cohen said the 24-hour news cycle and the speed at which information travels via social networks has given young people a new understanding and sense of urgency of how high the stakes are.
"Given that reality that’s in their faces and the infrastructure for mobilization that’s developing, there’s an opportunity for young people to engage in direct action in a way that is hopeful for all of us," she said.
Much of this infrastructure is dependent on what Daniel Maree, the 25-year-old lead organizer of last year’s Million Hoodies March in New York City, refers to as the democratization of technology. Using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and design techniques normally seen in corporate advertising, Maree and collaborators got thousands of people to Union Square in just two days. Despite the near absence of mainstream news stories about Martin’s death, images from the rally and Maree’s subsequent push of a petition demanding Zimmerman’s arrest helped get the incident onto the national stage.
In the days following the March 21st march, coverage of and Twitter conversations about the killing as well as signatures on a Change.org petition that had been started earlier that month skyrocketed. In June, the Pew Research Center reported that in the five years that it’s tracked weekly news coverage, Martin’s killing received more sustained coverage than any other story that was largely about race.
Maree, a digital strategist at an ad agency, worked with people such as Andrea Ciannavei, 38, a writer and Occupy Wall Street participant who offered up InterOccupy.net to help coordinate the mobilization. He hadn’t set out to position himself as a leader in the wake of the tragedy, but he saw a vacuum that needed to be filled.
"Every time I Googled Trayvon’s name, I didn’t see anything coming from any organization," Maree said. "I thought, ‘Nobody’s doing anything about this so I have to do something.’"
This pattern — an expectation that an established progressive or legacy civil rights organization would already be responding to a crisis, a realization that those groups didn’t have a game plan or were being slow to implement, followed by a quick pivot to take the reins and a willingness to work with (but not for) whoever then shows up — came up again and again as I spoke with young organizers. For many, the first wakeup call came with an acknowledgment of the Obama Administration’s limitations.
Nelini Stamp, an advisor to Dream Defenders who also participated in Occupy said that she’d had high hopes that the president would use the power of his office to address issues like racial profiling and police brutality. As her expectations have shifted, she’s put her hopes in the power of young people, especially young people of color, to bring about change.
"Now you have a movement that is really strong," Stamp, 25, said. "We should push this man and this country to do better because that’s what we thought we were getting."
One characteristic of how these younger organizers push is a willingness to move at a fast pace, abandoning what’s not working and moving on to new tactics when demands aren’t met.
"I think people are escalating a lot quicker and a lot earlier," Stamp said.
No group demonstrates this fearlessness and righteous impatience like the Dream 9, the transnational activists who until August 7 had been held for more than two weeks at a detention center in Eloy, Ariz. In an effort to bring attention to the 1.7 million deportations that have taken place since Obama has been in office, the group of undocumented immigrants traveled to Mexico, then turned themselves in at the US border seeking reentry on humanitarian grounds. This border crossing was broadcast via a Ustream live feed that attracted more than 10,000 viewers who cheered them on from around the world.
While the hashtag and rallying cry "Bring them home" shot around the Internet, the Dream 9 waited to learn whether they’d be granted return to the country they’ve known as home since they were children. Members of the group were isolated in solitary confinement, participated in a hunger strike and organized deportees inside the detention center, all in an effort to highlight the plight of many.
It’s necessary action that people at negotiating tables aren’t taking, said 27-year-old Mohammad Abdollahi, a member of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) and a coordinator of the action. Abdollahi said the NIYA maintains a broad view of what undocumented immigrants and their families actually need, and he echoes the sentiments of other organizers who see their work as the nimble and envelope-pushing counterpart to more plodding, bureaucratic processes that legacy organizations are often confined to.
"Our goal has always been for the greater immigration rights movement to catch up," he said. "Folks can have a trajectory of what’s possible in the movement and hopefully replicate or come up with more creative ways to do things themselves."

• • Dani McClain
  • Dani McClain is an Oakland-based journalist covering reproductive rights and sexuality.
    She reported on education while on staff at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and covered breaking news for the Miami Herald‘s metro desk. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Root, Loop21, AlterNet, On the Issues, and …

They carried signs that demanded “Voting Rights,” “Jobs for All” and “Decent Housing.” They protested the vigilante killing of an unarmed black teenager in the South and his killer’s acquittal. They denounced racial profiling in the country’s largest city.
 
This isn’t 1963 but 2013, when so many of the issues that gave rise to the March on Washington fifty years ago remain unfulfilled or under siege today. That’s why, on August 24, a broad coalition of civil rights organizations, unions, progressive groups and Democratic Party leaders will rally at the Lincoln Memorial and proceed to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the march and dramatize the contemporary fight. (President Obama will participate in a separate event commemorating the official anniversary on August 28.) The Supreme Court’s decision gutting the Voting Rights Act in late June and the acquittal of George Zimmerman less than three weeks later make this year’s march “exponentially more urgent” with respect to pressuring Congress and arousing the conscience of the nation, says Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, a co-sponsor of the march.
“The main themes will be voting rights, state laws like ‘stand your ground’ or local laws like stop-and-frisk, and the whole question of jobs and union-busting,” says the Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, who convened the march along with Martin Luther King III. “Fifty years after the original march for jobs and justice, we have a new version of the same issue.”
In 1963, current Congressman John Lewis—who nearly died marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama—was the youngest and most radical speaker at the March on Washington. When Lewis returns to the Lincoln Memorial to address the rally on August 24, he will be the only surviving speaker from that historic afternoon. “We have come a great distance since that day,” he said recently, “but many of the issues that gave rise to that march are still pressing needs in our society—violence, poverty, hunger, long-term unemployment, homelessness, voting rights and the need to protect human dignity.”
When it comes to voting rights, seven Southern states have passed or implemented new restrictions that disproportionately target people of color since the Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling. This follows a presidential election in which voter-suppression efforts took center stage and blacks waited twice as long as whites to vote, on average. On a more structural level, one out of thirteen African-Americans (2.2 million people) cannot vote because of felon disenfranchisement laws—four times higher than the rest of the population.
When it comes to the criminal justice system, there are more black men in prison today than were enslaved in 1850, according to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. African-Americans comprise 13 percent of the population but made up 55 percent of shooting deaths in 2010. Under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, “people who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time,” according to the Tampa Bay Times.
When it comes to the economy, the black unemployment rate (12.6 percent) is nearly double that of whites (6.6 percent), almost the same ratio as in 1963. The average household income for African-Americans ($32,068) lags well below that of white families ($54,620) and declined by 15 percent from 2000 to 2010.
These jarring statistics show a clear need for a twenty-first-century civil rights movement. “After the march, my hope is we will see more people going home being committed to doing work in their communities,” says Judith Browne Dianis, co-
director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization in Washington co-sponsoring the march. The Moral Mondays protests in North Carolina, the sit-ins by the Dream Defenders in Florida and the spontaneous rallies in 100 cities following the George Zimmerman verdict are evidence of a new wave of civil rights activism. “We’re seeing the civil rights movement rise again,” says Browne Dianis. “People understand that we have to get back to organizing and movement-building.”
For many years, civil rights organizations like the NAACP focused on building institutional power through litigation, lobbying and voting. Though they accomplished a great deal—we now have a two-term African-American president, after all—there’s a growing realization within the civil rights community that the protests and civil disobedience that defined the movement of the 1960s are once again essential to draw more attention to contemporary problems. “I wish this activism had more outbursts than just in North Carolina and Florida,” says civil rights veteran Julian Bond. “You wish it was twenty times as great, but to see these things that are going on—it’s exciting. These tactics are tried and true. They’ve worked in the past, and they’ll work now.”
Yet while the civil rights coalition is more diverse than it was in 1963—now including supporters from women’s rights, environmental, pro-immigration and LGBT groups—the funds are scarce today, even as the needs are growing. The declining strength of organized labor, which has accelerated following the passage of anti-union laws in GOP-controlled states since 2010, has drained the coffers of the organizations most accustomed to mobilizing masses of people. “The movement is more financially 
strapped than it has been in modern memory,” says Jealous.
Another daunting obstacle for the civil rights coalition is the right wing’s success in promoting the notion that historic remedies for centuries of discrimination, like the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, are no longer needed. “One of the great difficulties we have in helping people understand where we are on civil rights today is the desire of so many people to fix the civil rights movement in historical amber and visit it like a museum, without honoring that movement by being dynamically engaged in the principles that the movement stood for,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, another co-sponsor of the march.
At a recent congressional celebration of the 1963 march at the US Capitol, for example, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell reminisced about attending the march as a young civil rights activist, and House Speaker John Boehner introduced John Lewis. But when Senate majority leader Harry Reid denounced the flood of new voting restrictions in places like North Carolina and Texas following the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision and called for a congressional fix—to great applause—
McConnell and Boehner remained pointedly silent. “Boehner turned to McConnell with a questioning glance during the applause,” reported the Associated Press.
“You cannot, on the one hand, celebrate the march like John Boehner did, but then undermine what the march stood for, which is jobs and justice,” says Sharpton. “You can’t take a movement and say, ‘I celebrate the drama, but I don’t agree with the content.’”
At the same time, some progressive skeptics of the Obama administration believe the current civil rights leadership is too timid and cozy with those in power. Talk-show host Tavis Smiley predicts the new march will sidestep issues, like systemic poverty and the escalation of drone strikes, that King would have confronted were he alive today. “We’re going to get a lot of platitudes, a lot of great stories, a lot of endearing moments,” Smiley says. “But at the end of the day, we won’t even scratch the surface of the issues King was trying to get us to wrestle with.”
The radical politics of the 1960s civil rights movement, including those of its most mainstream leaders, is often glossed over in contemporary remembrances of pivotal anniversaries. Professor Cornel West, a caustic critic of this year’s commemoration, calls it the “Santa Clausification” of King. Many people also forget just how controversial the march was in 1963, both among the public and inside the civil rights community. Some thought it was too radical. President Kennedy asked the leaders to cancel the march. Lewis’s speech was censored to placate the archbishop of Washington. Bayard Rustin, the veteran socialist and civil rights activist who organized the event, was ostracized within the movement because of his homosexuality. Others thought it was too tame; Malcolm X dubbed it the “Farce on Washington.”
Despite all the criticism, the 1963 march remains a singularly important event in American history: the first time the country really understood what the civil rights movement stood for. The effect was greatest on the marchers themselves. “Many of the people at the march had never been to Washington before,” says Bond. “It was evidence to them that they had done something great and that great things would follow.”
Fifty years later, “there is, unfortunately, too much parallel between now and then,” says Jealous. “This is a moment for all of us to be rebaptized in the struggle.”

N.Y. Times, Aug. 17, 2013
Christie’s Re-election Engine Gets in Gear for a Bigger Race
By Jonathan Martin
BOSTON — He has hired specialists in microtargeting who worked for the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. He has built a sprawling, 50-state fund-raising network, including major Republican players like Harold Simmons, the billionaire backer of a Karl Rove-led “super PAC” that spent $105 million in the 2012 race.
And he is pouring resources into an effort to attract blacks, Hispanics and women to prove that he is a new kind of Republican.
As Gov. Chris Christie heads for what is expected to be an easy re-election, he is also quietly building a sophisticated political operation that could become the basis for a national campaign. His advisers, while saying the governor is focused on New Jersey, are aiming to run up a huge margin against his Democratic opponent and position Mr. Christie as a formidable figure among Republicans ahead of the next presidential primary.
At the Republican National Committee summer meeting in Boston last week, Mr. Christie and his aides repeatedly made the case that his re-election effort in heavily Democratic New Jersey this fall would offer a model for Republicans in the years ahead. And despite their claims to be focused only on 2013, his aides have also signaled to Republicans that the governor, if re-elected as expected, plans to begin visiting other states immediately after November.
Mr. Christie’s appearance at the twice-annual gathering of Republican state officials was significant. In addition to courting the conservative-leaning party activists, he met privately with two Republicans who could be helpful in a presidential race: Spencer Zwick, Mr. Romney’s well-connected chief fund-raiser, and Scott P. Brown, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts who is considering a Senate run in New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary. Already, Mr. Christie is assembling the kind of national fund-raising network that would be essential to a presidential campaign; some 35 percent of the $9 million he has raised for his re-election is from out of state, and he has held fund-raisers around the country, both in donor-rich enclaves like Palm Beach, Fla., and McLean, Va., and in Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago and throughout California.
Thanks to his prominence, and the fact that New Jersey is one of only two states with contests for governor this year, Mr. Christie has been able to cultivate big donors around the country.
“Under the guise of his re-election, he’s able to meet these folks and say, ‘I need your help,’ ” Mr. Rove said. The governor has tapped some boldface contributors like the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But more important for his future ambitions are the checks he has gathered from loyal Republican givers like Mr. Simmons, the deep-pocketed Dallas political patron, and lesser-known local power players like Dax R. Swatek, an Alabama lobbyist.
“I wrote him a check because, first, I think, as a Republican in New Jersey doing what he’s been able to do is pretty damn impressive,” said Mr. Swatek, who is close to many of his state’s leading Republicans. “Secondly, looking at it long-term, the way the presidential map is, it is going to be very difficult for Republicans to win without going into some states that are purple and blue. To me, the guy can do it.”
Not all of Mr. Christie’s donors this year can be counted on to support him if he runs for president in 2016. But winning the backing of people like Mr. Swatek, who can raise money from a wide variety of sources, helps the governor reach potential presidential donors in other state capitals and business communities across the country.
Mike DuHaime, Mr. Christie’s chief strategist, has also reached out to Mercer Reynolds, a Cincinnati executive who is one of the Republican Party’s top contributors and was Mr. Bush’s finance chair in 2000. Earlier this month, Mr. Christie held a fund-raiser at a Las Vegas hotel owned by the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Mr. Adelson and his wife, two of the biggest contributors to Republicans last year, were listed as co-hosts and each gave Mr. Christie the maximum contribution of $3,800.
Of course, the governor has a long way to go to prove to Republicans nationally that he can be the party standard-bearer, and some conservative activists are still smarting over his embrace of President Obama in the days after Hurricane Sandy.
And New Jersey voters may resent what they see as his exploiting state issues to appeal to the conservative wing of the national party. The governor recently vetoed $7.5 million in family planning spending and Friday vetoed three gun-control measures. Barbara Buono, his opponent in the governor’s race, frequently says he “would rather be campaigning in the cornfields of Iowa.” According to an analysis by Democrats, since last August Mr. Christie was outside of New Jersey for all or part of 91 days, or roughly 24 percent of the time. Mr. Christie emphasized that much of that out-of-state travel was for nonpolitical trips.
Senior Republicans who are familiar with Mr. Christie’s strategy say it is most closely modeled after Mr. Bush’s bid in 1998 for re-election as governor of Texas. The parallels are clear. Mr. Bush was considered a shoo-in for re-election to the governor’s office, but he and Mr. Rove became determined to win over Hispanic and black voters to demonstrate the governor’s broad appeal to a national audience. Mr. Bush won that race, with 68 percent of the vote, which included more than a third of the Hispanic vote, offering him a powerful credential when he ran for president two years later as “a different kind of Republican.”
This summer, Mr. Christie established a bilingual campaign office in Paterson, N.J., and spent $275,000 on a Spanish-language television ad. He has also announced a Hispanics for Christie coalition and is now running even among Hispanic voters against Ms. Buono, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released 10 days ago.
“He’s going to emphasize first trying to win a big re-election with a diverse coalition behind him,” Mr. Rove said.
Despite his lead, Mr. Christie is spending expansively to enhance his targeting of voters this year. While his core team is filled with fixtures of presidential politics — including Mr. DuHaime, the ad man Russell J. Schriefer, the communications director Maria Comella and the campaign chairman, William J. Palatucci — he has brought aboard a new Republican firm, Deep Root Analytics.
The group includes strategists from Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign and the consultants who ran Mr. Romney’s data effort last year, and is helping Mr. Christie direct his advertising more precisely by determining what voters are watching on TV, and from that, deciding what ads to air and when. (Mr. Obama’s campaign used the same technology in 2012.)
“The unspoken element in the room is that this could potentially be a test of what works and what doesn’t” for a presidential contest, said a Republican with knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing Mr. Christie’s circle.
The timing gives Mr. Christie distinct advantages: If he prevails in November, he will be handed a big national platform — the chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association. The position will give him a reason, and ample time, to travel the country, meet with activists and candidates, and raise unlimited money for the association, freed from federal and state regulations that limit him as governor from seeking contributions from those that do business with the state. Early primary states, including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, are holding governors’ races next year, so Mr. Christie will surely visit. And he will ultimately get to play the role of political Santa Claus inside the Republican Party, distributing millions in campaign cash to grateful governors and would-be governors.
Even if Mr. Christie is well-positioned, however, skepticism toward him within the Republican base is still real. And, despite the warm reception he received in Boston, some resistance was apparent.
“I just really had a little bit of a problem with him embracing Obama,” explained Paul Reynolds, the national Republican committeeman from Alabama, after Mr. Christie spoke. “I’ve got to get over that.”
The broader challenge for Mr. Christie regarding party activists is that he is not seen as sufficiently tough on a president the Republican base loathes, and is too quick to throw an elbow at other Republicans, as he did with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky on national security issues last month.
William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard who recently met privately with Mr. Christie over pizza, said the governor must avoid being seen as the Republican who likes to beat up on his own party.
“The party hates that and they will not forgive it,” Mr. Kristol said. “A Republican who simply comes from a different part of the country, has a few differences on issues but respects the actual Republican primary voter worldview — that’s a different story. That’s the line Christie needs to walk. He doesn’t have to be a red state Republican, but he needs to respect red state Republicans.”
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Derek Willis contributed research.
 

The state is now able to claim compliance with federal standards for fine-particle air pollution (soot) because it has only one monitor in each county in the state (and not all of those are operating all the time). If they had more monitors they would detect more pollution and very well might exceed federal standards. There are plenty of “hot spots” that they aren’t monitoring — for example near the shipping port and the airport in Newark. In other words, by its design, the monitoring system is rigged to minimize the measurement of pollution. Furthermore, the standards have been set for each pollutant as if it were the only pollutant people were inhaling, which is demonstrably untrue. And finally, the press release is notably silent on what standards are being met. Is NJ meeting the new daily and annual PM2.5 standards that EPA has proposed? Are we meeting the health-based standards that have been set in California? It’s unclear. I suspect that if N.J. were meeting EPA’s proposed more stringent standards the press release would have said so. –P.M. (pm8525@gmail.com)
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IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 20, 2013
Contact:  Lawrence Ragonese (609) 292-2994
Lawrence Hajna       (609) 984-1795
Bob Considine         (609) 984-1795
 
CHRISTIE ADMINISTRATION ANNOUNCES ATTAINMENT OF KEY EPA AIR POLLUTON HEALTH STANDARD IN METROPOLITAN AREAS
MILESTONE MEANS ALL OF NEW JERSEY MEETS FEDERAL STANDARD FOR FINE PARTICLES
(13/P82) TRENTON – In another positive step for air quality in New Jersey, the Christie Administration today announced that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has notified the state that New Jersey’s metropolitan areas are in compliance with federal standards for fine particles, a type of pollutant that can cause serious health problems, especially in vulnerable populations.
This action means all of New Jersey’s counties for the first time meet federal health standards for this air pollutant.
“This is a major milestone for New Jersey and for the health of our residents, especially the young, the elderly, and those with chronic respiratory conditions who are particularly at risk to this pollutant,” said Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner (DEP) Bob Martin. “This is a result of the Christie Administration’s continued commitment to protecting and enhancing the state’s environment, including taking aggressive steps to control sources of pollution within New Jersey’s borders and fighting out-of-state sources of pollution that impact our air quality.”
Specifically, the EPA has notified the state that counties that are part of the state’s two major metropolitan areas meet the daily and annual health standards for fine particles, also known as Particulate Matter (PM) 2.5. The attainment status will become effective upon publication in the Federal Register.
In the New York metropolitan region, those counties in attainment are Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Passaic, Somerset and Union. In the Philadelphia region, those counties are Burlington, Camden and Gloucester. The eight remaining New Jersey counties already meet the EPA’s health standards for fine particles.
Fine particles are two and one half microns or less in width, or approximately 1/30th the width of a human hair. According to EPA, fine particles may pose the greatest health risks of all air pollutants because they can lodge deeply into the lungs.
Exposure to fine particles can cause short-term health effects such as eye, nose, throat and lung irritation, coughing, sneezing, runny nose and shortness of breath. Exposure to fine particles can also affect lung function and worsen medical conditions such as asthma and heart disease.
The state manages air quality with ambient air monitoring, inventories of sources, emission reduction plans, rules, permits, stack testing, air quality modeling and risk assessment, vehicle testing, inspections and enforcement.
“We have worked tirelessly to control emissions from a variety of sources, including coal-fired power plants, diesel engines and motor vehicles,” Commissioner Martin said. “At the same time, we have become a national leader in the development of renewable energy, while promoting greater use of cleaner burning natural gas. We are confident that, as a result of our sound policies, we will continue to meet the standard for fine particles into the future, as we continue to make progress in reducing the pollutants that cause ozone smog.”
In addition to addressing in-state sources of these pollutants, the Christie Administration has taken on out-of-state sources, notably winning an unprecedented victory with the EPA’s approval of petition forcing a coal-fired power plant in Portland, Pa. to drastically reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide.
This plant, operated by GenOn REMA, has been a major source of sulfur dioxides to northern New Jersey. Sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides from coal-burning power plants convert to fine particles as they are transported by wind currents. The Administration recently secured an agreement that will result in the permanent cessation of the use of coal at this facility in 2014.
The DEP also has participated in lawsuits against owners of the Homer City Station plant and against Allegheny Energy Inc., to cut massive emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pouring into New Jersey from those western Pennsylvania plants.
Additional steps taken by Governor Christie to improve air quality in New Jersey include:
*       Adopting a policy of not allowing new coal-fired power plants to be built in New Jersey, and ensuring that additional generation comes from clean energy sources.
*       Mandating 2015 closure or latest technology upgrades to polluting “peaker units”‘ during high energy demand days.
*       Approving a pilot program to reduce diesel emissions from big construction vehicles at state construction sites.
*       Completing retrofits or replacement of diesel engines on 800 NJ Transit commuter buses.
*       Setting a new, lower standard for sulfur content for home heating oil.
For more information on air quality in New Jersey, including a link to information about the state’s air monitoring network and daily air quality reports, please visit: the Division of Air Quality website at: http://www.nj.gov/dep/daq/