SFO screens for new virus from China
Public health officials have begun screening passengers arriving at SFO from Wuhan, China, for a mysterious new respiratory virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The pneumonialike virus was discovered in Wuhan, the most populous city in central China, and has been confirmed in more than 200 people, according to Chinese health authorities. Three people have died from the virus, which has spread to Beijing and Shenzhen.
The CDC has deployed more than 100 staffers to check passengers arriving from Wuhan to San Francisco International Airport, New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport. They are the first health screenings of airline passengers in the U.S. since the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
CDC spokesman Scott Pauley declined Sunday to say whether any passengers at SFO or any other airport had shown symptoms or been diagnosed with the virus.
“We know it’s crucial to be proactive and
his family, the police said Raheem was driving a stolen car. But Anderson told me that the couple saved together to buy the car, a 1992 Toyota.
After initially refusing to get out of the car, police say, Raheem ran, according to Anderson. He was shot running from officers and later died in a hospital, Anderson told me.
Raheem, the company, seeks to end police violence in Oakland. I wonder: Can a database of stories really change the way police interact with people, particularly communities of color?
“What we hope to do is to bring a new way of evaluating the performance of police,” Anderson said as we sat inside Peet’s Coffee on Broadway. “We want to take those stories, those reports and translate them into meaningful policy, particularly around the use of force that governs the Oakland Police Department.”
The public can’t rely on all Oakland police officers to accurately report use of force.
In August, my colleague Megan Cassidy reported that an internal audit found that officers failed to report using force against a suspect in more than onethird of instances studied in 2018. All of those unreported incidents involved a nonwhite suspect.
To curb racial bias in traffic stops, officers began declining to pull people over for lowlevel infractions like a broken taillight in 2018. Sure, it reduced the number of “discretionary” stops (ones not initiated by a 911 call), but the flagrant racial disparity in stops remains intact. Blacks were 55% of motorists stopped in 2018, dropping from 61% in 2017, according to police data. Whites, by contrast, accounted for 9% of stops in 2017 and 11% in 2018.
This is happening in a department that for almost two decades has been undergoing courtmonitored reform. In November, the Police Department started using technology that can flag potentially bad police officers before they become dangerous.
Regina Jackson, the police commission’s chairwoman, doesn’t think it’s enough.
“We are saying that a lot of the ways that policing is done is wrong, but that’s the way a lot of people have been trained,” Jackson said. “In order to shift the paradigm, you have to deliver a lot of information that is counter to what people have learned and that they’ve practiced.”
The commission is paying Raheem $40,000 for the threemonth contract. Anderson, an Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq as a satellite engineer, said Raheem will compile the Oakland stories by using arrest data and an algorithm that scrapes social media sites. The company will contact people and ask them about the interaction.
“It’s our responsibility to help (the police) understand and learn from different perspectives — perspectives that are not steeped in policing,” Jackson said. “When you only look through one lens, you see the same thing over and over again.”
Raheem categorizes police violence in four areas: physical abuse, psychological abuse, economic exploitation and neglect. Since the nonprofit started in July 2017, Anderson said it has helped almost 2,400 people tell of their experiences with police violence. Their stories are searchable on Raheem’s website.
“We have welcomed Raheem at our ad hoc policy meeting, and we also welcome hearing the stories from our community,” Oakland Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said. “We want our citizens to have a voice in our policy development, especially on use of force.”
For Anderson, shaping Oakland’s useofforce policy is just the start. Ultimately, he wants to focus on crime reduction.
“If what we continue to do is keep expanding the role of police as a means of reducing crime, without addressing the need that drives community members to commit crime, then we aren’t solving the problem,” he said. “We’re just feeding the beast that continues to feed off of us.”