Monday, August 19, 2019
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NYC Judge says cop who killed Eric Garner was ‘untruthful’ in his statements, recommends firing
A New York judge affirmed that Officer Daniel Pantaleo did not give credible testimony and was “untruthful” in his narrative about the chokehold death of Eric Garner.
—Phoenix looks to be next big city with citizen police review—
Pantaleo faced a disciplinary trial this year to determine if he was unethical in how he dealt with the Garner case. A judge determined he was and said Pantaleo gave several dishonest statements about how he handled the 2014 arrest of Garner and the questionable way he implemented a deadly chokehold.
NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonado recommended that Pantaleo be fired saying the testimony Pantaleo gave after Garner died was “implausible and self-serving,” and “disingenuous.”
“I found (Pantaleo’s) uncorroborated hearsay statements explaining his actions to be untruthful,” Judge Maldonado said, according to the New York Times Sunday night.
“First, I found (Pantaleo) to be disingenuous when he viewed the video and denied using a chokehold, even though his actions were completely consistent with his own erroneous and restrictive definition of the Patrol Guide prohibition,” the judge wrote.
She continued, “Second, the preponderance of the credible evidence contradicted his rationalization that the positioning of his elbow protected Mr. Garner’s neck and that he exerted no pressure to the throat.”
Maldonado likened Pantaleo’s behavior to “criminal recklessness.”
Rev. Al Sharpton said NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill has the confirmation he needs from Maldonado to fire Pantaleo.
—Florida community terrorized by teen threatening to kill black people in ‘KKK’ video—
“Her ruling to me clearly says that the commissioner has to terminate him. I do not see how he could give a logical, legal or police policy reason to do anything less,” Sharpton said. “It would make a mockery of having police trials if you have a decision that’s not ambiguous at all to be ignored…. There’s no gray area here.”
Garner’s mother Gwen Carr said Sunday Pantaleo should have been long gone.
“The judge’s report confirms what I have been saying for more than five years: Pantaleo used a banned chokehold, murdered my son and should have been fired years ago,” Carr said in a statement. “Judge Maldonado also confirmed that other officers’ testimony was unreliable.”
Pantaleo faced charges but was cleared in 2019 of any wrongdoing.
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Phoenix looks to be next big city with citizen police review
Dozens of people, mostly African Americans, huddled around tables scattered across a church gymnasium on a recent evening, discussing past run-ins with Phoenix police officers and ways to hold them accountable.
In a city still stinging from a video of officers pointing guns and cursing at a black family this summer, the confidential talks intended to give officials in the country’s fifth-largest city ideas on how residents could help oversee the police.
“I want to see, hear, feel and touch what you are coming up with so we can make real change,” said Police Chief Jeri Williams, wearing a casual civilian shirt and slacks to the gathering at the church. “I understand we have some real internal work to do.”
Phoenix is among the last big U.S. cities without independent civilian oversight of police, said Samuel Walker, professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Phoenix’s powerful police union has blocked past efforts to establish such a board and is resisting the new push.
Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Denver and Portland, Oregon, are among many cities with some kind of civilian oversight, with more joining following high-profile police killings of black men and others in recent years.
Police in Colorado Springs, Colorado, released video this week showing officers fatally shooting a black man as he ran away.
Williams, who’s a black woman, and other Phoenix officials are moving toward adopting some kind of independent civilian oversight of police and are visiting communities this month to review their models.
Walker, who co-wrote the book “The New World of Police Accountability,” said citizen oversight is a must for all modern U.S. police agencies.
“Phoenix needs to get over this opposition to civilian oversight, it exists virtually everywhere else,” Walker said. “It is a basic way of building trust.”
Walker said there are two basic types of oversight: civilian review boards, which investigate individual complaints, and independent auditors or monitors, which he prefers because they recommend practices and policies. There are also hybrids with elements of both.
“The communities need a process they can trust, whether it is a board, an auditor or a monitor,” agreed Liana Perez of the educational group National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement.
While oversight boards or monitors offer recommendations, final decisions on firings and other discipline lie with the police chief and city and state laws.
The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association said on its website that it’s a “bad idea” for civilians unfamiliar with state and U.S. constitutional law to make independent recommendations about police discipline.
The union added that residents already sit on some Phoenix police boards with officers and commanders who oversee use-of-force cases.
But the civilian review models would go further and be independent from the Police Department. Civilian board members could recommend discipline of officers and changes in policies and procedures. Depending on what Phoenix choses, board members could even get subpoena power to compel people they are investigating to testify.
The police union did not respond to requests for additional comment on civilian review.
The changes come after cellphone video emerged in June showing Phoenix officers answering a shoplifting call by aiming their guns and yelling obscenities at Dravan Ames and his pregnant fiancee, Iesha Harper, who was holding their 1-year-old daughter. The video sparked outcry nationwide.
The couple later said their 4-year-old daughter took a doll from a store without their knowledge.
Phoenix also has moved to build greater trust and transparency by recently rolling out the last of 2,000 body-worn cameras for a force approaching 3,000 officers, one of the last big police agencies in the U.S. to do so.
The department this month also began training officers to track when they point their guns at people, a procedure now embraced by departments nationwide.
The National Police Foundation recommended that policy after finding Phoenix had 44 officer-involved shootings last year, more than any other U.S. law enforcement agency. Twenty-three were fatal.
The police union has criticized city leaders who back independent civilian oversight, especially Councilman Carlos Garcia. The former leader of an immigrant rights group, who wore an “End Police Brutality” T-shirt to a recent City Council meeting, said he prefers a hybrid approach.
“We really need aspects of both, with a civilian review board that has community input on procedures and policies as well as subpoena power and the ability to recommend on discipline,” Garcia said in an interview at the Aug. 6 listening session at the First Institutional Baptist Church gym.
The session was far smaller than gatherings soon after the video emerged in June, when several thousand people crowded into another church to complain about past experiences with police.
Unlike some cities, Phoenix is not under federal orders to change its use-of-force practices.
The Albuquerque Police Department must comply with a federal consent decree after an investigation found a “culture of aggression,” including some 20 fatal shootings over four years and the use of unreasonable force against mentally ill people.
That court order gave subpoena power to Albuquerque’s oversight board, allowing it to call witnesses and access documents, New Mexico ACLU policy director Steven Allen said.
Oversight panels “aren’t always the silver bullet,” Allen said. “But they can be part of the solution.”
Gizette Knight, a former New Yorker living near Phoenix, said she thinks increased community policing, in which officers have greater contact with residents, would be just as helpful as independent civilian oversight.
“The police knew who we were, they knew my grandma, and all the neighbor kids,” Knight, 33, said of her old neighborhood in Queens.
More than anything, residents and the police should consider new ways of viewing law enforcement, said Jody David Armour, a University of Southern California law professor who specializes in race and legal decision making.
“For long and abiding changes, it will take a kind of revolution in the way we think about crime and punishment,” Armour said. “And in our relations between police and the community.”
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Bernie Sanders’ criminal justice plan aims to cut prison population
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is proposing a criminal justice overhaul that aims to cut the nation’s prison population in half, end mandatory minimum sentencing, ban private prisons and legalize marijuana. He says the current system does not fairly treat people of color, addicts or the mentally ill.
“We have a system that imprisons and destroys the lives of millions of people,” Sanders told The Associated Press before the planned released of his proposal Sunday. “It’s racist in disproportionately affecting the African American and Latino communities, and it’s a system that needs fundamental change.”
Sanders was promoting the plan during a weekend of campaigning in South Carolina, where the majority of the Democratic electorate is African American. The Vermont senator, who won the support of some younger black Democrats during the 2016 primary, has stepped up his references to racial disparities, particularly during stops in the South and urban areas.
Before about 300 at a town hall in Columbia on Sunday afternoon, Sanders conducted a conversation on the plan with several state lawmakers who have endorsed him. Also part of the discussion was Donald Gilliard, Sanders’ South Carolina deputy political director, who was at one time sentenced to life in federal prison for a nonviolent drug crime.
“Sometimes you don’t even believe what you’re hearing here,” Sanders said Sunday, of the problems he sees in the criminal justice system.
As president, Sanders said he would abolish mandatory minimum sentencing and reinstate a federal parole system, end the “three strikes law” and expand the use of alternative sentencing, including community supervision and halfway houses. The goal is to reduce the prison population by one-half.
“A very significant number of people who are behind bars today are dealing with one form or another of illness,” Sanders said. “These should be treated as health issues, not from a criminal perspective.”
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness , 2 million people with mental illness are booked into jails annually.
Taking aim at what his proposal calls “for-profit prison profiteering,” Sanders would ban private prisons, make prison phone calls and other inmate communications free, and audit prison commissaries for price gouging and fees.
The plan would legalize marijuana and expunge previous marijuana convictions, and end a cash bail system that Sanders says keeps hundreds of thousands who have not been convicted of a crime languishing in jail because they cannot afford bail.
“Can you believe that, in the year 2019, 400,000 people are in jail awaiting a trial because they are poor?” Sanders said. “That is a moral outrage, it is a legal outrage.”
According to the Prison Policy Initiative , more than 460,000 people are being held in local jails around the country while they await trial, with a median bail amount of $10,000 for felony offenses.
Sanders wants to improve relations between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve. To do that, he proposes to end federal programs that provide military equipment to local police forces, establish federal standards for the use of body cameras, provide bias training and require that the Justice Department review all officer-involved shootings.
“You have a lot of resentment in minority communities all over this country, who see police forces not as an asset but as an invading force,” Sanders said.
On capital punishment, Sanders’ plan formalizes his call to end the federal death penalty and urges states to eliminate the punishment as well.
“When we talk about violence in society and trying to lower the levels of violence, it is not appropriate that the state itself is part of capital punishment,” Sanders said.
Sanders said that over the long term, his plan will save the public money because of reductions to overall incarceration costs.
“It will cost money but it will pay for itself many, many times over,” Sanders said. “Locking people up is very, very expensive.”
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Sunday, August 18, 2019
Using Wall Street secrets to reduce the cost of cloud infrastructure
Stock market investors often rely on financial risk theories that help them maximize returns while minimizing financial loss due to market fluctuations. These theories help investors maintain a balanced portfolio to ensure they’ll never lose more money than they’re willing to part with at any given time.
Inspired by those theories, MIT researchers in collaboration with Microsoft have developed a “risk-aware” mathematical model that could improve the performance of cloud-computing networks across the globe. Notably, cloud infrastructure is extremely expensive and consumes a lot of the world’s energy.
Their model takes into account failure probabilities of links between data centers worldwide — akin to predicting the volatility of stocks. Then, it runs an optimization engine to allocate traffic through optimal paths to minimize loss, while maximizing overall usage of the network.
The model could help major cloud-service providers — such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google — better utilize their infrastructure. The conventional approach is to keep links idle to handle unexpected traffic shifts resulting from link failures, which is a waste of energy, bandwidth, and other resources. The new model, called TeaVar, on the other hand, guarantees that for a target percentage of time — say, 99.9 percent — the network can handle all data traffic, so there is no need to keep any links idle. During that 0.01 percent of time, the model also keeps the data dropped as low as possible.
In experiments based on real-world data, the model supported three times the traffic throughput as traditional traffic-engineering methods, while maintaining the same high level of network availability. A paper describing the model and results will be presented at the ACM SIGCOMM conference this week.
Better network utilization can save service providers millions of dollars, but benefits will “trickle down” to consumers, says co-author Manya Ghobadi, the TIBCO Career Development Assistant Professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
“Having greater utilized infrastructure isn’t just good for cloud services — it’s also better for the world,” Ghobadi says. “Companies don’t have to purchase as much infrastructure to sell services to customers. Plus, being able to efficiently utilize datacenter resources can save enormous amounts of energy consumption by the cloud infrastructure. So, there are benefits both for the users and the environment at the same time.”
Joining Ghobadi on the paper are her students Jeremy Bogle and Nikhil Bhatia, both of CSAIL; Ishai Menache and Nikolaj Bjorner of Microsoft Research; and Asaf Valadarsky and Michael Schapira of Hebrew University.
On the money
Cloud service providers use networks of fiber optical cables running underground, connecting data centers in different cities. To route traffic, the providers rely on “traffic engineering” (TE) software that optimally allocates data bandwidth — amount of data that can be transferred at one time — through all network paths.
The goal is to ensure maximum availability to users around the world. But that’s challenging when some links can fail unexpectedly, due to drops in optical signal quality resulting from outages or lines cut during construction, among other factors. To stay robust to failure, providers keep many links at very low utilization, lying in wait to absorb full data loads from downed links.
Thus, it’s a tricky tradeoff between network availability and utilization, which would enable higher data throughputs. And that’s where traditional TE methods fail, the researchers say. They find optimal paths based on various factors, but never quantify the reliability of links. “They don’t say, ‘This link has a higher probability of being up and running, so that means you should be sending more traffic here,” Bogle says. “Most links in a network are operating at low utilization and aren’t sending as much traffic as they could be sending.”
The researchers instead designed a TE model that adapts core mathematics from “conditional value at risk,” a risk-assessment measure that quantifies the average loss of money. With investing in stocks, if you have a one-day 99 percent conditional value at risk of $50, your expected loss of the worst-case 1 percent scenario on that day is $50. But 99 percent of the time, you’ll do much better. That measure is used for investing in the stock market — which is notoriously difficult to predict.
“But the math is actually a better fit for our cloud infrastructure setting,” Ghobadi says. “Mostly, link failures are due to the age of equipment, so the probabilities of failure don’t change much over time. That means our probabilities are more reliable, compared to the stock market.”
Risk-aware model
In networks, data bandwidth shares are analogous to invested “money,” and the network equipment with different probabilities of failure are the “stocks” and their uncertainty of changing values. Using the underlying formulas, the researchers designed a “risk-aware” model that, like its financial counterpart, guarantees data will reach its destination 99.9 percent of time, but keeps traffic loss at minimum during 0.1 percent worst-case failure scenarios. That allows cloud providers to tune the availability-utilization tradeoff.
The researchers statistically mapped three years’ worth of network signal strength from Microsoft’s networks that connects its data centers to a probability distribution of link failures. The input is the network topology in a graph, with source-destination flows of data connected through lines (links) and nodes (cities), with each link assigned a bandwidth.
Failure probabilities were obtained by checking the signal quality of every link every 15 minutes. If the signal quality ever dipped below a receiving threshold, they considered that a link failure. Anything above meant the link was up and running. From that, the model generated an average time that each link was up or down, and calculated a failure probability — or “risk” — for each link at each 15-minute time window. From those data, it was able to predict when risky links would fail at any given window of time.
The researchers tested the model against other TE software on simulated traffic sent through networks from Google, IBM, ATT, and others that spread across the world. The researchers created various failure scenarios based on their probability of occurrence. Then, they sent simulated and real-world data demands through the network and cued their models to start allocating bandwidth.
The researchers’ model kept reliable links working to near full capacity, while steering data clear of riskier links. Over traditional approaches, their model ran three times as much data through the network, while still ensuring all data got to its destination. The code is freely available on GitHub.
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Music icon Teddy Riley receives his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
Decades after his musical talents changed the game for R&B and Hip Hop, songwriter, producer and singer Teddy Riley finally received the indelible recognition he deserves with a star on the coveted Hollywood Walk of Fame, this past Friday.
“I’m thrilled [about the honor], but it’s a calm, cool excitement because I’m afraid of anxiety,” Riley told Variety prior to the ceremony. ”I think, however, I’m going to be pretty emotional about my star the day-of.”
Riley pioneered the sound that would become known as “New Jack Swing,” which took over the music scene in the late 80s and 90s. Riley worked with countless artists like Bobby Brown, Keith Sweat, Michael Jackson, Keith Sweat, Doug E. Fresh and in 1987, Riley started his own group called Guy.
As a member of Guy, he and his group mates landed roles in the acclaimed movie New Jack City. In 1991, Riley started another group called Blackstreet, which would orchestrate hits like “Don’t Leave” and “No Diggigty,” the latter, would win him a Grammy award. According to KABC, Riley has more than 1,000 musical credits to his name. Riley has earned awards and accolades throughout his career for his contributions to music.
READ MORE: Teddy Riley says Bruno Mars, The Weeknd helping to carry on legacy of ‘New Jack Swing’
“My uncle bought me Roland keyboards, a Yamaha S-30, a string clavier and a Fender Rhodes — my set-up forever,” Riley remembered. “Once I borrowed a TEAC two-track, reel-to-reel from a friend I was ready to go. I still had to make drum sounds by mic-ing a toilet tissue roll as my kick drum — I’d even beatbox through the hole — but it gave me that bottom. I cherish that memory.”
In addition to the Walk of Fame, the Harlem native was recently honored with an induction to the Hip-Hop Hall of Fame and received the Soul Train Legend Award. KABC reported that he is also slated to have his own Las Vegas residency called “Teddy Riley and Friends,” which will begin showings at the end of the year.
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