Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 77

The Extradition of Lauri Love to the U.S.

NEWS BRIEF A British court approved Friday the extradition of alleged hacker Lauri Love to the United States, where he faces nearly a century in prison for hacking into U.S. government computers.

The Westminster Magistrates’ Court’s ruling, handed down by Judge Nina Tempia, approves Love’s extradition to the U.S., where he faces charges including hacking government agencies, conspiracy, and identity theft in New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. If convicted, he could serve up to 99 years in prison.

The 32-year-old native of Suffolk is accused of being involved in a series of Anonymous-affiliated hacks known collectively as #OpLastResort, in which the international hacking group infiltrated computers of U.S. government agencies, including the FBI, the U.S. Army, the Missile Defense Agency, and the Federal Reserve. U.S. authorities said his actions resulted in the release of employees’ person information and caused millions of dollars in damage.

Love, who has Asperger’s syndrome, warned that his mental health would pose a high risk of him committing suicide if he is sent to a U.S. prison—a move his lawyer, Tor Ekeland, said would “crush” his client.

“I accept Mr. Love suffers from both physical and mental health issues but I have found the medical facilities in the United States prison estate … are such that I can be satisfied his needs will be comprehensively met by the U.S. authorities,” Judge Tempia said in her decision.

Love was first arrested in October 2013 under the Computer Misuse Act, which recognizes the unauthorized access, modification, and obtaining of computer materials as a criminal offense. The high-profile arrest came as a result of a joint investigation by the FBI and the United Kingdom’s then-newly formed National Crime Agency (NCA).

Love’s lawyers have advocated for their client to be tried in the United Kingdom, citing the exception made for Gary McKinnon, who was also accused of hacking U.S. military computers, in 2012. McKinnon, who also has Asperger’s syndrome, had his extradition to the United States blocked by then-Home Secretary Theresa May on the grounds that it would constitute a violation of his human rights. May is now the country’s prime minister.

“I have concluded that Mr. McKinnon’s extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life, that the decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr. McKinnon’s human rights,” May

An Unrepentant Trump Finally Acknowledges Obama as American

You’d think this wouldn’t be too hard a question: Was Barack Obama, the president of the United States, born in the United States? On the one hand, there’s a thick stack of documentation, from official records to newspaper announcements to eyewitnesses. On the other, there’s no evidence and a great deal of racism.

And yet Donald Trump couldn’t bring himself to admit it until Friday morning.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump said, which is untrue. “I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”

It was a notable moment—the chief proponent for years of the slander that Obama was not born in Hawaii admitting he was wrong—and yet one shot through with dishonesty. Clinton did not start the birther movement, and Trump, rather than seeking to end the controversy, worked at length to fan it. Even after Obama released his “long-form” birth certificate, meanwhile, Trump continued to spread birther innuendo. The statement is at once a welcome recognition and also obviously too little, too late, after Trump spent five years fanning the racist conspiracy theory.

The brief, terse statement came after a parade of Trump campaign officials insisted publicly for several days that Trump now believed Obama was born in the United States. But the candidate himself? On Thursday, he was asked by The Washington Post what he thought, and he refused to answer. “I’ll answer that question at the right time,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”

Amid heated backlash, Trump’s campaign issued a statement late Thursday, signed by spokesman Jason Miller:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President. This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer. Even the MSNBC show Morning Joe admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump.



In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

The statement is a remarkable farrago of falsehood and frivolity.

Start with the first paragraph. The idea that Clinton started the birther story is a common one among birthers, who for some reason are unwilling to own the origins of their theory. It’s based on a memo from Mark Penn, first published by Joshua Green in The Atlantic, in which the Clinton campaign strategist suggesting harping on Obama’s “lack of American roots.” (The statement, in fact, links to Green’s story.) That seemed to be a reference to Obama’s time spent overseas, but it was a political argument, if a dirty one. The Clinton campaign never raised questions about Obama’s eligibility. The Trump campaign characterizes this as “vicious and conniving behavior” even as Trump eagerly positioned himself as the highest-profile proponent of birther innuendo.

Next up is the idea that “Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate.” That’s quite the rhetorical turn: One can’t very well gin up a bogus national story questioning the legitimacy of the president and then lament it as an “ugly incident” without admitting one’s own central role. The claim that Trump “successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not” is similarly out there. Trump is on more solid ground saying that he “successfully compell[ed]” Obama to release the long-form document, but Trump himself did nothing to obtain it. His claim that he was sending investigators to Hawaii at the time appears to have been false, too.

While the statement suggests that Trump felt assured of Obama’s origins once the long-form certificate was released, his own public statements tell a different tale—one of a man eager to prolong the “ugly incident” through innuendo and questions for years after the 2011 release. Here are a few examples:

When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18, @BarackObama was Barry Soweto. Weird.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2012

An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2012

How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s “birth certificate” died in plane crash today. All others lived

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2013

Attention all hackers: You are hacking everything else so please hack Obama's college records (destroyed?) and check "place of birth"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2014

But anyway, why can’t Trump say this all himself? Reporters began wryly recirculating a tweet from May where Trump made his feelings about spokesmen clear:

Don't believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign. The only quote that matters is a quote from me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2016

Friday morning, Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that he’d address the question during a press conference at 10 a.m. at his new hotel in Washington, D.C.

Perhaps Trump really does believe that Obama was born overseas. Or maybe he’s making a political calculation. Trump’s work riling up birthers in 2011 was an important step for him in moving from the world of business to the world of politics. It gained him a following in certain segments of what’s now known as the alt-right and in conservative media outlets like Breitbart. Birthers remain an important part of his supporters. In an NBC News/Survey Monkey poll this summer, nearly three-quarters of Republicans had questions about whether Obama was born in the United States, with 41 percent saying he was not and another 31 percent saying they were unsure.

That’s the vise Trump has set for himself. When a campaign is constructed on a foundation of racist dogwhistling, it’s hard to disavow racist dogwhistles. But then again, when a campaign is constructed on a foundation of racist dogwhistling, it’s difficult to win a majority of the vote.

Deutsche Bank's Refusal to Settle With the DOJ

NEWS BRIEF Deutsche Bank said Friday it has no intention of paying the $14 billion settlement the U.S. Department of Justice demanded in order to end its civil suit, which stems from risky mortgaged-backed securities that led to the 2008 global financial crisis.

The figure would be one of the highest settlements paid by a bank to resolve similar lawsuits. But the final amount will probably be significantly less, because the U.S. often begins negotiations with a tough posture and high price. Still, the figure seemed to be much more than Deutsche Bank expected.

In a statement, the bank said:

Deutsche Bank has no intent to settle these potential civil claims anywhere near the number cited. The negotiations are only just beginning. The bank expects that they will lead to an outcome similar to those of peer banks which have settled at materially lower amounts.

Upon news of the Justice Department’s figure, Deutsche Bank’s stock plummeted 8 percent. The Wall Street Journal reported the news first, and spoke with lawyers for the bank who said they expected $2 billion or $3 billion as a reasonable settlement. That figure is lower than similar settlements reached with other banks, like Goldman Sachs, which paid $5 billion in April. The highest so far has been Bank of America’s $16.5 billion in 2014.

The settlement with Deutsche Bank opens a new round in Justice Department lawsuits, because most of the banks that have already settled are U.S.-based. The suit against Deutsche Bank, headquartered in Germany, will likely lead to similar suits against Europeans financial institutions like Barclays, Credit Suisse Group, and the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, all of which are under investigation.

These settlements are all a result of the housing bubble buildup and the ensuing financial crisis. This was caused by banks that promoted bundled mortgages they sold as safe investments, but were actually poor-quality loans with adjustable-rate mortgages that borrowers were unlikely to pay back.

Did the Philippine President Really Kill a Man With an Uzi?

Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, is a tough-talking, boastful man known for hyperbole and crass statements. During the election, he promised to fatten the fish of Manila Bay with the bodies of criminals. He has bragged about killing three men suspected of kidnapping and raping a woman. He has called several public figures, including the American president and the pope, sons of whores.

The latest controversy concerns Duterte’s time in Davao, a city in the country’s south, where he served as mayor beginning in the late 1980s. It emerged Thursday during a hearing by the Philippine senate committee investigating Duterte’s recent war on crime, which has killed more than 3,500 people—47 per day—since he took office on June 30. A man testified that while Duterte was mayor of Davao, he ran a hit squad in the city, ordering him and others to carry out extrajudicial killings.

Edgar Matobato said Thursday that as a member of the so-called Davao Death Squad, “we were tasked to kill criminals every day, including pushers and snatchers.” Matobato said he fed one man to a crocodile. The death squad regularly dumped bodies into the sea with their stomachs eviscerated so they would sink, he said. He claimed Duterte once unloaded two magazines from an Uzi submachine gun into an agent with the National Bureau of Investigation because the agent accidentally blocked the squad’s cars while members were on a mission.

“Mayor Duterte was the one who finished him off,” Matobato said.

Matobato also implicated Duterte in the bombings of mosques in retaliation for a 1993 grenade attack on the San Pedro Cathedral. He said Duterte ordered the hit squad to abduct and kill Muslims, whom they buried in a quarry owned by a police officer. By 2013, Matobato said he had grown tired of killing. When he asked to be dismissed from the death squad, he said the members framed him for murder. “I was tortured for a week,” Matobato said, offering this betrayal as the reason for coming forward now.

Duterte has denied any connection to vigilantism—both as mayor and as president. Duterte’s son, Paolo Duterte, who is vice mayor of Davao, said the man’s claims were “all based on hearsays.” Former congressman Prospero Nograles also called Matobato a liar, saying four of the men he claimed to have killed were still alive.

The senate inquiry is being led by senator Leila de Lima, a vocal critic of Duterte, who in turn the president accuses of taking money from drug traffickers.

Matobato said Duterte recruited him around 1988 into the “Lambada Boys,” an assassin squad in Davao that killed more than 1,000 people. His group later joined policemen and former communist rebels to form the Davao Death Squad, which reported to Duterte, who they referred to as “Charlie Mike.” Matobato said Duterte ordered the killing of a radio commentator named Juan Pala, who was gunned down in 2003 by men on a motorcycle. Pala had been a constant critic of corruption in Davao and some of his work focused on Duterte. In June, as Duterte gave a speech that endorsed killing journalists who took bribes from criminals, Duterte mentioned Pala, saying, “I do not want to diminish his memory, but he was a rotten son of a bitch. He deserved it.”

Duterte ran for president this year promising to do for the Philippines what he had done for Davao: clear out the drug addicts, round up the criminals, and clean the city of corruption. In the 10 weeks since he assumed the presidency, vigilantes have killed nearly 2,000 people, leaving cardboard signs by the corpses that label them drug dealers. The police have killed another 1,500. Human-rights groups have demanded investigations and international attention to the murders, saying he’s connected to 1,400 killings as mayor of Davao.

Human-rights groups have also called Duterte the “Death Squad Mayor,” a moniker he seemingly embraced in May during the election, saying in televised remarks, “Am I the death squad? True. That is true.”

Matobato’s testimony places that comment under scrutiny. But proving any of his testimony will be difficult. As president, Duterte has wide influence and power. Some senators don’t like that he rose to office on a populist message, and that he disparaged and taunted the old political guard. But Duterte enjoys diverse and wide support, like from the current vice president, a social activist from the country’s liberal party—the party Duterte accuses of trying to unseat him.

Asked if anyone could corroborate his testimony, Matobato said, “No. They’re all afraid.”

The FBI's Impersonation of an AP Editor

NEWS BRIEF The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General says no rules were violated when an FBI agent posed as an editor for The Associated Press in 2007 while investigating bomb threats near Seattle.

In a report released Thursday, the watchdog said:

We found that Department and FBI policies in effect in 2007 did not prohibit agents from impersonating journalists or from posing as a member of a news organization, nor was there any requirement that agents seek special approval to engage in such undercover activities.

Here’s the background to the story: In June 2007, Charles Jenkins, a 15-year-old high school student, emailed a series of bomb threats over the course of a week to school administrators that resulted in the closure of Timberline High School. In order to conceal his location, he used a proxy server located in Europe. Local law enforcement sought the FBI’s help. Here’s what the FBI’s field office in Seattle did next, according to the report:

FBI agents developed a plan to surreptitiously insert a computer program into Jenkins’s computer that would identify his true location. An FBI undercover agent posed as an editor for the Associated Press (AP) and contacted Jenkins through e-mail. During subsequent online communications, the undercover agent sent Jenkins links to a fake news article and photographs that had the computer program embedded within them. Jenkins activated the computer program when he clicked on the link to the photographs, thereby revealing Jenkins’s true location to the FBI.

Jenkins was subsequently arrested and expelled from school; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced in July 2007 to 90 days of juvenile detention, two years of supervised release, two years of mental health counseling, and two years of probation with restriction on internet and computer usage.

The FBI did not publicize its role in the investigation, but Wired, in July of that year, reported on the bureau’s actions. Seven years later, the Seattle Times reported on the content of the emails sent by the FBI—content that the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the bureau.

The AP and several news organizations protested to Eric Holder, the then attorney general. In a letter to Holder in 2014, the AP’s general counsel said the bureau “both misappropriated the trusted name of The Associated Press and created a situation where our credibility could have been undermined on a large scale.”

FBI Director James Comey, in a letter to The New York Times, defended the bureau’s actions, calling it “proper and appropriate” under the rules governing such actions at the time.  

Amid the scrutiny, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General began an investigation—the FBI falls within the department’s purview—and released its findings Thursday. The inspector general said there was no explicit policy that prohibited agents from pretending to be journalists.

The AP wasn’t pleased—even if other news organizations mocked the bureau’s attempts at journalism. Here’s its statement:

The Associated Press is deeply disappointed by the inspector general’s findings, which effectively condone the FBI’s impersonation of an AP journalist in 2007. Such action compromises the ability of a free press to gather the news safely and effectively and raises serious constitutional concerns.Once again AP calls on the government to refrain from any activities involving the impersonation of the news media and we demand to be heard in the development of any policies addressing such conduct.

The Syrian Ceasefire's Humanitarian Crisis

NEWS BRIEF The United Nations is having trouble getting aid deliveries to Syria in the midst of a cease-fire between government troops and rebel forces, Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy to Syria, said Thursday in Geneva.

“We have a problem,” de Mistura said in public remarks about the delivery of much-needed humanitarian relief to civilian populations.

Despite the on-going cease-fire, which went into effect this week following a U.S.-Russian agreement, de Mistura cited a lack of cooperation by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“We need government permission,” he said. “That is obvious.”

The UN envoy said humanitarian relief deliveries would be focused on besieged neighborhoods in rebel-controlled parts of Aleppo, the city in northern Syria that has seen increased fighting over the past few weeks. In 40 days preceding the cease-fire, 2,000 people were killed, including 700 civilians. Among them, 160 were children, according to estimates by the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a London-based watchdog group.

The humanitarian aid deliveries cannot take place, however, unless the 40 UN trucks are granted permits to enter those areas. De Mistura said the Syrian government previously agreed to grant the authorization prior to the signing of the cease-fire deal, but no such facilitation letters have been received.

Jan Egeland, de Mistura’s senior adviser, urged the Syrian government to give UN trucks the access they needed.

“Our appeal is the following—it’s a simple one,” Egeland said. “Can well-fed, grown men please stop putting political, bureaucratic and procedural roadblocks for brave humanitarian workers who are willing and able to go to serve women, children, wounded civilians in besieged and crossfire areas?”  

De Mistura said the Russian government, which supports Assad’s regime, has voiced disappointment over the inability to get humanitarian aid into Syria.

The nature of the cease-fire itself is fragile, with several reported violations, and sparring between the U.S. and Russia over the extent of their military cooperation—a precondition of the cease-fire agreement—against ISIS and al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.

In Moscow, Igor Konashenkov, a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, criticized the U.S. for what he called a failure to remain faithful to the agreement.

“Russia has from the first minute fulfilled its obligations to enforce the cease-fire regime on Syrian territory,” Konashenkov said, according to Russia’s state-run Sputnik News. “At the same time, the various U.S. State Department and Pentagon officials’ statements about the prospects of ‘Russian fulfillment’ of the agreements reached on Syria are puzzling.”

Mark Toner, a U.S. State Department spokesman, told reporters Wednesday the violations were being monitored “on both sides,” and said the U.S. would continue its outreach to ensure opposition forces abide by the cease-fire, and that Russia must ensure the al-Assad regime do the same.  

Toner also announced Wednesday that John Kerry, the American secretary of state, and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, agreed to extend the seven-day ceasefire for an additional 48 hours, with the goal of establishing a Joint Implementation Center to coordinate intelligence and airstrikes against agreed upon targets.

“They agreed to discuss and agreed to extend the cessation for another 48 hours, obviously with the goal being that this would last seven days,” Toner said. “And then we would move, as I said, to the next step, which is the establishment of the JIC.”

Twenty-four hours into the cease-fire, de Mistura said Syria had already seen a “significant drop in violence,” noting that the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus, the country’s capital, remained relatively calm.   

Since the start of the Syrian Civil War, which is entering its sixth year, the UN estimates that at least a quarter of a million people have been killed, and millions more displaced, both internally and overseas. This year, an estimated 13.5 million Syrians, 6 million of whom are children, are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The Longlist for the National Book Awards

NEWS BRIEF The National Book Foundation announced Thursday its longlist of 10 titles in the running for the National Book Award for fiction, which celebrates the best in American literature over the past year.

Garth Greenwell (What Belongs to You) is the sole debut novelist in this year’s longlist, released in The New Yorker. There are veteran writers in the form of Chris Bachelder for The Throwback Special, his fourth book; Paulette Jiles for News of the World, Karan Mahajan for The Association of Small Bombs, Elizabeth McKenzie for The Portable Veblen, and Lydia Millet for the Sweet Lamb of Heaven.

Previous finalists also made the list, including Adam Haslett, (also previously nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) for Imagine Me Gone, Brad Watson, for his second novel, Miss Jane, and Jacqueline Woodson, who previously won in the Young People’s Literature category for her 2014 memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, this time longlisted for her novel Another Brooklyn. Colson Whitehead  is nominated for the critically acclaimed The Underground Railroad, which follows a slave’s adventures in the antebellum South.

The fiction longlist follows a week full of announcements, with the National Book Foundation unveiling the contenders for the Young People’s Literature, Poetry, and Nonfiction categories. The 40 books in the running this year span a diverse range of genres, writers, and experiences.

Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, said: “These are all really different books, with high-quality writers in varying stages of their careers,” she  said. “All these books are about different journeys, lives, families, experiences.”

Lucas said she was not only excited for first-time writers who made the cut to gain new attention and acclaim, but also for readers to encounter these new titles for the first time.

The finalists will be revealed October 13, with the winners to be announced at a ceremony in New York on November 16.

The $1.9 Million Settlement in the Sandra Bland Case

NEWS BRIEF The family of Sandra Bland, who was found dead in a Waller County, Texas, jail cell in July 2015, has reached a settlement with state and county officials that would provide $1.9 million to the family and require reforms to policing and jails.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Under terms of the settlement released Thursday, changes would be required for both [the Texas Department of Public Safety] and Waller County. The DPS has agreed to provide de-escalation training for all current and former troopers statewide.

Waller County would be required to have a nurse or emergency technician at the jail round-the-clock, and would set up a tele-medicine system so that inmates could be screened by physicians face-to-face, Rhodes said. The county also would be required to set up sensors to validate cell checks electronically, he said.

State representatives would be asked to work together to draft legislation in Bland's name to require similar changes in other rural jails.

Bland was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change, a common pretextual stop. (Waller County has a long history of racism.) In the exchange that followed, which was captured on video and elicited outrage nationwide, Trooper Brian Encinia dragged Bland from her car and wrestled her to the ground. She was taken to jail, where officials said she hanged herself.

In December 2015, a grand jury declined to indict anyone in Bland’s death. In January, Encinia was indicted for perjury, after a grand jury decided it did not believe his explanation for why he pulled Bland from her car. In March, Encinia was fired by the Texas Department of Public Safety and also pleaded not guilty.

Of the settlement money, $100,000 would come from the public safety department and the balance from Waller County. The agreement still needs to be approved by a judge.

The Atlantic Ocean's First National Monument

NEWS BRIEF There’s 5,000 square miles of vibrant ecosystems off the coast of Cape Cod, filled with millennium-old corals, extinct volcanoes that tower 7,000 feet above the seafloor, canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon, and vast varieties of underwater species. Now, it’s federally protected.

President Obama designated the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument at a State Department conference Thursday, making it the first national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean. The president, in a statement, said ocean ecosystems face threats from climate change:

Through exploration, we continue to make new discoveries and improve our understanding of ocean ecosystems. In these waters, the Atlantic Ocean meets the continental shelf in a region of great abundance and diversity as well as stark geological relief. The waters are home to many species of deep-sea corals, fish, whales and other marine mammals.

This latest monument designation adds to another he made last month in the Pacific Ocean, expanding the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, just off the Hawaiian coast, another 443,000 square miles. It is now the world’s largest marine reserve.

The president can designate national monuments out of public lands without congressional approval. Making these underwater ecosystems national monuments protects the region from fishing, drilling, and mining.

The Police Shooting in Columbus, Ohio

Updated on September 15 at 11:34 a.m.

NEWS BRIEF Police in Columbus, Ohio, responding to a report of a robbery, shot and killed a 13-year-old suspect they say “pulled a gun from his waistband.” The weapon was later found to be a BB gun with an attached laser site.

OFFICER-INVOLVED SHOOTING: Armed robbery suspect fatally shot after pulling gun while police tried to make arrest. pic.twitter.com/03oiR38B8f

— Columbus Ohio Police (@ColumbusPolice) September 15, 2016

The 13-year-old was later identified as Tyree King. Chief Kim Jacobs identified the officer as Bryan Mason, a nine-year veteran of the force who had recently transferred to the area.  Under the department’s policy, Jacobs said, Mason will receive mandated psychological support counseling and given time off.

At a news conference Thursday morning, Andrew Ginther, the Columbus mayor, said King’s death was “troubling,” calling it a “call to action for our entire community.” He called King’s possession of a “replica of a firearm” “very, very dangerous conduct.” Ginther said the investigation would take time and urged patience, and added: “It is a dangerous time to be a police officer in this country. It is our job to protect them as well as the people they protect.”

Jacobs, speaking at the news conference, said police were looking to see if there was video of the shooting. The city’s officers don’t wear body cameras, though Ginther said he hoped they would be deployed early next year.

Jacobs added: “Our officers carry a gun that’s practically identical to” the weapon allegedly carried by King. Jacobs detailed the next steps in the investigation: The Critical Incident Response Team will review the killing, and the prosecutor will present the evidence to a grand jury. If the grand jury decides to charge the officer, she said, the case would go through the courts. If it doesn’t, the review would be examined by officers in Mason’s chain of command and other police brass.

Jacobs said there had been 13 incidents this year in Columbus in which officers had shot people; there were five fatalities, she said, and one officer had been killed, as well.

King’s death is likely to once again raise scrutiny of how police respond to reports of crimes, as it comes just two years after 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was holding a pellet gun, was shot and killed by police in nearby Cleveland. Indeed, several high-profile killings of black boys and men by police beginning with Michael Brown in 2014 and continuing over the years (most recently with the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling), have resulted in U.S. Justice Department investigations into the police departments in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Ferguson, Missouri. As my colleague David A. Graham previously reported in the wake of the Justice Department’s findings last month in Baltimore:

The Baltimore report fills out a trifecta alongside similar documents fromCleveland and Ferguson. In each case, the Justice Department was brought in following the death of a black man at the hands of police that had resulted in outraged demonstrations in the streets: in Cleveland, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams (though the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice shortly before the Justice Department announced its findings overshadowed that case); in Ferguson, Michael Brown; and in Baltimore, Freddie Gray. In each of those cases, criminal prosecutions did not result in convictions, and, in fact, only the Gray case resulted in charges.

Jacobs said there were some witnesses to the shooting, and added “some of the officers at the scene were very disturbed” at what had happened.