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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The use of deadly force by the Los Angeles Police Department and the number of suspects killed in violent encounters with officers dropped in 2018, a report has found.
Even with the reductions, the LAPD led the nation in fatal police shootings last year, with 14, according to the report cited by the Los Angeles Times .
The department report presented to the Police Commission on Tuesday found officers fired their weapons 33 times in 2018 — compared with 44 shootings the previous year. That's a 25% decrease.
It's the second-fewest incidences of police shootings in a single year since 1989, the report said.
Of the 33 shootings, 24 people were hit by gunfire. The 14 people who died represented a slight drop from 17 the previous year. Fatal shootings have fallen each year since officers killed 21 people in 2015, the department said.
Nearly 90% of those shot by police last year were armed with a firearm or other weapon.
Police Chief Michel Moore credited the reduction to new policies, additional training and body cameras worn by patrol officers. The department is working to be more transparent by releasing videos of shootings within 45 days of incidents, Moore said.
The Police Commission, the civilian panel that oversees the police department, adopted policy changes in recent years requiring officers whenever possible to de-escalate situations before resorting to bullets, the newspaper said. That can mean keeping a distance and taking more time to let encounters evolve by talking to people or requesting more resources.
Members of the panel praised the reductions, but they said the LAPD has room to improve.
Education systems have every incentive to look better than their results, the author says.
While I respect Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester Finn and Executive Vice President Michael Petrilli for their decades of work in education reform, in their recent article, “ Education Reform a Test for GOP,” they grade the Republican Party on an overly generous curve. In neglecting the crucial role of the federal government as a disruptive force for school improvement, the authors aren’t just reciting conservative talking points – they’re ignoring extensive evidence to the contrary.
Take, for example, Humboldt Secondary School, located right outside House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline’s district in St. Paul, Minnesota. After being identified as one of the state’s persistently lowest achieving schools in January 2010, Humboldt Secondary School received a School Improvement Grant from the federal government. Humboldt chose the “ transformation” model , opting to replace half its staff, extend learning time for students, and set aside 50 minutes per day for teachers to collaborate in teams. In just three years, Humbolt’s graduation rate has increased from under 60 percent to 77 percent, and the school has seen a significant increase in reading and math proficiency rates.
But Humboldt is just one success story. As a country, we have a long way to go to close persistent achievement gaps and ensure that every child has the tools he or she needs to succeed in college and in a career. It is time to take into account what we have learned from No Child Left Behind in the past decade and improve the federal accountability and school improvement system, rather than end it.
And Washington’s role is crucial. State and local education systems have every perverse incentive to make themselves look better than their results. No one wants to be the governor who closes down schools, even when these schools have failed students and families for generations. Instead, elected officials tend to neglect the lowest-performing schools out of fear of shaking up the system. Absent a federal referee, states would create accountability systems that mask failure and exaggerate success.
Even in states with successful track records in education reform, the federal government can provide leverage and cover for reform-minded superintendents who share a goal of achieving greater results. Without the kind of comprehensive accountability and improvement system included in Senate Education Committee Chairman Tom Harkin’s ESEA legislation or Ranking Member George Miller’s Democratic substitute amendment, the federal government effectively would be sending money straight into school district bureaucracies with no guaranteed consequences for continued failure.
Finn and Petrilli argue, “Though Democrats never admit it, Washington is clumsy at best, and wildly incompetent at worst, when it comes to improving schools from the shores of the Potomac.” And it’s true that if Washington were getting involved in the day-to-day operations of a school, it would be a disaster.
But that’s a strawman: I have not heard any of my Democratic colleagues argue for federal micromanagement. Instead, what the federal government needs to do is ensure that districts and states improve schools. We cannot take “we’ve always done it this way” as an answer and should leverage limited federal dollars to support successful local initiatives that disseminate and encourage best practices.
Like Finn and Petrilli, I am a strong proponent of successful education reform efforts at the state and local level. I’m proud that my home state of Colorado is a leader on this score, and passed SB 191, a bipartisan tenure reform and teacher evaluation bill, in 2010. But not all states are like Colorado, and even in Colorado, the federal dynamic of the Race for the Top competition was critical to passing our reforms. As we compete in an increasingly global economy, elected officials at all levels of government must focus on improving student achievement nationwide, not just in our own backyards.
Chairman Kline’s H.R. 5, the Student Success Act, would effectively remove the federal responsibility for ensuring that states and districts take an active role in turning around the lowest performing schools. This legislation would give states the ability to define down success, and therefore disguise learning gaps and persistently failing schools. While we should provide flexibility for turning around failing schools, we cannot allow districts and states the flexibility to do nothing year after year and consign an even larger segment of an entire generation of kids to poverty. And I fear that under the “Student Success Act,” we would be doing exactly that.
Roque, a former fighter pilot with Hollywood good looks, staged his defection from Cuba in 1992, swimming to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay and declaring opposition to Fidel Castro.
He became a pilot for Brothers to the Rescue, a group dedicated to searching for rafters in the Florida Straits. But then he stunned everyone in 1996, slipping back into Cuba the day before Cuban MiGs shot down two civilian aircraft flown by members of the exile group.
Now 57 and living with his girlfriend in a cramped Havana apartment, Roque said he’s sorry four people were killed in the Feb. 24, 1996, incident.
The four dead included Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña, Pablo Morales and Armando Alejandre Jr.
Alejandre’s sister, Maggie Khuly, said justice was never done.
“Speaking for the families, my family in particular, we’re looking forward to the day when Roque faces U.S. courts on his outstanding indictment,” said Khuly, a Miami architect.
The shoot-down drove U.S.-Cuba relations to a new low and prompted then-President Bill Clinton to sign the Helms-Burton Act, which ramped up economic sanctions against Cuba.
Since then, U.S.-Cuba relations remain as chilly as ever. President Barack Obama loosened some travel restrictions to Cuba after taking office, but has done little else to ease the tension. In fact, U.S. officials have worked steadily to undermine the socialist government, spending more than $200 million on Cuba democracy programs since 1996.
Cuban spies in Miami and Havana watch these efforts carefully, sometimes foiling U.S. plans. In 2009, Cuban authorities arrested Alan Gross, a development worker from Maryland. He was a subcontractor for the Agency for International Development and was caught smuggling sophisticated satellite communication gear into Cuba. Cuban authorities slapped him with a 15-year prison term in 2011.
Cuban authorities say they’re willing to trade Gross for Cuban agents arrested in Florida after the FBI broke the so-called Wasp spy network in September 1998.
Four of those agents remain in American prisons. A fifth spent 13 years in jail and is now free, but can’t return to Cuba until he serves three years’ probation in the United States.
The agents are known as the Cuban Five. For 14 years, they have been at the center of a massive Cuban propaganda campaign. They are celebrated as heroes who were defending their homeland. They are household names in Cuba and their likeness is plastered all over signs, billboards and buildings.
Roque’s spying exploits were as dramatic as any of the Cuban Five, but he returned to the island to live a life of obscurity.
U.S. authorities haven’t forgotten him, however, and some Cuban exiles demand that the Cuban government return him to Florida to face charges.
A federal indictment charged Roque with failing to register as a foreign agent and conspiring to defraud the United States in May 1999.
Asked about the charges, Roque sighs. He said he believes the Cuban government was justified in defending its air space, but he should not be held responsible for the deaths.
Some critics question his sincerity.
“If Roque is so convinced of his innocence, then he should turn himself in to stand trial and clear his name,” said Thomas Van Hare, co-author of Betrayal, a 2009 book about the shoot-down.
“He’s a maggot,” added the book’s second author, Matt Lawrence.
No doubt, Roque is one of the most hated figures in South Florida after the Castro brothers. He’s the spy who got away. And after a home video of him singing, drinking liquor and greeting his mother in Spain surfaced on YouTube in 2011, Cuban exiles in Miami pounced.
“The son of a dog reappears,” the video proclaimed.
“Richard Gere’s Cuban double,” as Roque has been called, learned to fly MiGs in the former Soviet Union.
Photos in the book show Roque hobnobbing with such anti-Castro lawmakers as U.S. Sen. Robert Menéndez, D-N.J., and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.
Roque remembers those days with a mix of nostalgia and regret.
He said he’s alone in Cuba now and misses his relatives in the United States.
Alejandro Roque, 48, said he hasn’t been in touch with his older brother since 1996. He said he didn’t agree with Roque’s ideas back then.
“The world situation is complex, and often the ideologues fail to distinguish between governments and people ... bandits and victims,” Alejandro Roque said.
Asked if he had any regrets, Juan Pablo Roque said he wishes he had done more to stop the shoot-down.
Roque remains convinced that Cuba was right to defend itself against exile organizations in Florida. A Salvadoran who said Cuban exiles paid him to plant bombs in Cuba is serving a 30-year term for an attack that killed an Italian tourist in Havana in 1997. Roque believes exiles were bent on provoking chaos in Cuba that would justify U.S. military intervention.
“There still are groups that want a confrontation, that want blood. They want three, four, five days to kill,” Roque said.
Former members of Brothers to the Rescue admit that they occasionally dropped political leaflets that landed in Havana, but said their primary mission was humanitarian. In the early 1990s, they flew hundreds of missions over the Florida Straits, spotting more than 17,000 Cuban rafters and helping save their lives. They contend that Roque lied about the group to the FBI, painting it as an extremist group interested in carrying out acts of sabotage in Cuba.
Roque wants the United States and Cuba to end the hostilities and normalize relations. He dreams of seeing fighter pilots from the United States, Cuba, Vietnam and Russia joining together to share ideas.
Ana Margarita Martínez doesn’t believe a word of it — and it’s no wonder. As part of his elaborate cover, Roque married her in 1995 only to abandon her and her two children less than a year later.
“If you look up the definition of sociopath, it describes him well,” she said.
It could have been worse. Roque could have landed in an American jail.
He was surprised at how aggressively U.S. authorities pursued other members of the Wasp spy network.
Khuly isn’t sympathetic to Hernández’s plight.
“He has had every opportunity that the United States offers its citizens to defend himself — all the way up to the Supreme Court — and he’s not even a U.S. citizen,” Khuly said.
“I did so many jobs. I asphalted streets there. I took on that job with African-Americans. They liked me a lot. Every time they asked me where I was from, I told them I was Cuban. They asked me if that was near Alaska. But I felt a lot of solidarity with them.
Now unemployed, Roque said he reads as much as he can about science, aviation and the cosmos. He works out regularly and prefers weightlifting and parallel bar exercises, a regimen he learned in the Soviet Union.
He said if he had to swim to the Guantanamo naval base again — some 6 kilometers, or 3.7 miles, from the Cuban side — he wouldn’t hesitate.
He declined to disclose the price of the two-story, three-bedroom home he is selling. The house belonged to his parents and has a lush backyard filled with tropical plants and fruit trees.
The ex-spy’s Rolex is a GMT Master II, a model designed for pilots with the help of Pan Am Airways in the 1950s.
Used GMT Master II watches go for $4,500 and up on eBay, but Roque hopes his will fetch more than that in an auction.
STOCKTON -- Two local colleges came together Thursday to formalize a partnership that will change how students can get a college degree in Stockton.
"I just think it’s absolutely the most wonderful thing that has happened in a long time around here and it’s just going to be awesome for our students," said the President of San Joaquin Delta College Dr. Kathy Hart.
San Joaquin Delta College and Stanislaus State have signed off on a partnership that will enable students to graduate from the Turlock-based Cal State without ever leaving Stockton.
"We’re calling it WOW, Warriors On the Way. So the Mustangs are galloping on their way to becoming a Warrior and when they come here they know there is a pathway to becoming a Warrior," said Dr. Ellen Junn, the president of CSU Stanislaus.
Before the agreement, it was difficult for students graduating from Delta College to complete their bachelor's degree without having to leave the area. Now, nine different bachelor's degree programs, including psychology, business and communication studies, will be offered at Stanislaus State’s Stockton center that Delta College students can begin working toward when they enroll at the junior college starting this fall.
"Creating this seamless pathway, from preschool all the way through doctorate," said Dr. Faimous Harrison, the dean of the CSU Stanislaus Stockton Center. "We want to have local options for residents to actually continue their education here."
Several master’s degrees, credential and a doctorate program will also be offered at the Stockton Center, which currently serves over 800 students. Stanislaus State says they are already considering ways to expand their reach in Stockton if this new pathway goes as planned.
"Having an opportunity to expand opportunities locally, increase the amount of degrees and to grow exponentially," Harrison said. "If that’s going to meet the needs of the constituents, that’s what we are here for."
The schools say classes will be offered to ensure a timely completion of the degree and hope to make higher education more accessible to the thousands that call San Joaquin County home.
Stanislaus State hopes to expand this partnership with other junior colleges in the region.
For Devonta Freeman, he knows about playing as an undefeated team. He played on the 2013 Florida State team who went 14-0, defeating the Auburn Tigers in the National Championship.
So, how’s he feel about the Atlanta Falcons sitting at 5-0 and looking to get to 6-0 on Thursday night? He’s not stressing, that’s for sure. As Michele Steele of ESPN reports, Freeman says there’s "no pressure" in the situation.
Talked to #Falcons RB Devonta Freeman – who played on 2013 FSU team. "I've been undefeated" – says there's "no pressure" on the way to 6-0.
Freeman has led the charge for the Falcons, rushing for 405 yards and eight touchdowns so far in 2015. Once again, he’ll look to pace Atlanta’s offense, as the team looks to get their sixth straight win Thursday.
Guests sampled beer and played pinball on more than 400 machines at last year's Pinball and Pints event at the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda.
What could be better than sipping beer as you play pinball? This year's SF Beer Week festivities include a night of Pinball & Pints in Alameda.
During SF Beer Week, the California Academy of Sciences will be celebrating with a particularly sudsy Nightlife at the Academy event.
Founded by Nico Freccia, left, and brewmaster Shaun O'Sullivan, San Francisco's 21st Amendment Brewery will host a "Brew Free! Or Dine" beer dinner during SF Beer Week.
Santa Clara Valley Brewing is hosting a yeast class during SF Beer Week this year.
Get ready to join the 10th annual San Francisco Beer Week celebrations, the 10-day brew extravaganza that runs from Feb. 9 to 18. Chances are high that Bay Area beer lovers already know all about the festival’s big tentpole events — the opening gala on San Francisco’s Pier 35 on Feb. 9, the annual Double IPA Festival held at Hayward’s the Bistro on Feb. 10 and the big Celebrator bash at Berkeley’s Trumer Brauerei on Feb. 17.
But SF Beer Week includes hundreds of other events to check out, too. Some require tickets and reservations, others are walk-ups, where you pay at the bar. Here are eight especially fun, under-the-radar events to add to your itinerary — some wild, some playful and some educational in the best possible way.
Part of the fun of SF Beer Week is that there are always a few wild and wacky events that explore the beer world in new or different ways. This year, that lineup includes Tricycle Drag Races at Oakland’s Ale Industries (Feb. 18), the disco-themed Twisted Tasting at Santa Cruz’s Civic Auditorium (Feb. 17, $18), and Pinball & Pints at Alameda’s Pacific Pinball Museum (Feb. 11, $40).
Don’t miss the beer-themed NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences ($15), which mixes science and suds from 6 to 10 p.m. on Feb. 15.
Chocolate and beer go together as perfectly as Valentine’s Day and SF Beer Week share a calendar page. There are several chocolate-beer dinners offered this year, but I’m heading straight for the Sweet & Sour Valentine Takeover at Walnut Creek’s ØL Beercafe & Bottleshop. From 4 to 11 p.m. on Feb. 14, you can taste a sour and a sweet beer from each of seven breweries, served alongside chocolates and other sweets. There’s no quicker way to get to the heart of the matter.
Ten “official” collaboration beers have been brewed this year to salute the festival’s 10th anniversary, but there are numerous informal ventures, too. One of the latter is rolling out at one of my favorite Oakland bars, the Good Hop. Long before owner Melissa “Malty Maven” Myers opened her beer bar, she was a brewer at Magnolia, Pyramid and Ross Brewing (now Iron Springs). She definitely knows her way around the mash paddles. This year, she’s done special collaboration beers with Hoi Polloi, 21st Amendment, 47 Hills, Oakland United Beerworks and Benoit Casper, and a cider with South City Ciderworks. Taste them all at the Good Hop’s Collabopalooza, which runs from 3 to 10 p.m. Feb. 12.
A beer dinner can be one of the best ways to learn how beer pairs with different foods. Many of these are multiple-course affairs with a different beer paired with each dish, from appetizers to dessert. I could go to one every night. But I’m particularly looking forward to this one at San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery on Feb. 12. Brewmaster Shaun O’Sullivan will be on hand, along with Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver — author of “The Brewmaster’s Table” — and Gordon Schuck from Denver’s Funkwerks. The menu includes beer pairings from all three breweries, as well as three desserts. Find details and order tickets ($75) at sfbeerweek.org.
Education has been part of the SF Beer Week mission since its earliest days. The more you learn, the more you appreciate the beer in your glass. So this year’s festival includes more than 70 educational events, including this fascinating lecture and tasting ($70) at San Jose’s Santa Clara Valley Brewing. New York City craft beer pioneer John LaPolla will be lecturing and leading a tasting from 2 to 5 p.m. on Feb. 11.
Find details on all of the above, plus another 600 suds-centric events, at sfbeerweek.org.
Beer writer Jay R. Brooks is one of the co-founders of SF Beer Week. Contact him at BrooksOnBeer@gmail.com.
Melanie Brown and new husband Stephen Belafonte can hardly be said to have a quiet life, with her impending Spice Girls tour and three daughters between them, including a baby of four months. Even so the 33-year-old singer and her handsome film producer partner managed to sneak some time together for a romantic dinner alone in West Hollywood on Wednesday.
Stopping off for at the shops before their dinner date the newlyweds kissed and cuddled, appearing very much in honeymoon mode after their secret June wedding - the details of which she exclusively shares with HELLO! readers this week.
Signs of their packed family life were very much in evidence, though, as the couple used their quality time to pick up some of the goodies on offer in a children's store. The lucky recipients were, no doubt, among their brood, which is comprised of Mel's two little girls, baby Angel and Phoenix Chi, eight, and Stephen's three-year-old child.
Mother of two Mel has said that Memphis-born Stephen is a hands-on dad, who easily met her most pressing requirement in a lover - that he got on with Phoenix. Her "well travelled and sophisticated" beau also won her over with his supportive attitude this year, telling the Leeds-born performer: "We are a complete team. I want to be with you forever."
India rode on skipper Virat Kohli's century and stumper Mahendra Singh Dhoni's controlled fifty to beat Australia by six wickets in the second ODI and level the three-match ODI rubber 1-1 here on Tuesday.
Chasing a competitive 299, the tourists banked on a collective batting effort from the top order, before a 82-run fourth wicket stand between Kohli (104) and Dhoni (55 not out) ensured the team's win with four balls to spare.
Earlier, the Aussies rode on the batting heroics of Shaun Marsh (131) and Glenn Maxwell (48) to post 298/9 even after the Indian pace duo of Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Mohammed Shami shared 7 wickets between them.
Brief Scores: Australia 298/9 (Shaun Marsh 131, Glenn Maxwell 48; Bhuvneshwar Kumar 4/45, Mohammed Shami 3/56) lose to India 299/4 (Virat Kohli 104, Mahendra Singh Dhoni 55 not out) by 6 wickets.