Public Safety & Justice Update 10/21/22

Federal judges have struck down gun restrictions in the months since a Supreme Court decision that expanded Second Amendment rights…

 Gun owners in San Jose who disobey a requirement to carry liability insurance and pay a yearly fee will pay up to $1,000 in fines as part of the city’s push to combat gun violence…

New Jersey residents hoping to carry guns in public would be required to buy insurance and complete gun-safety training under a measure introduced by legislative leaders last week…

 In June 2021, the city of Baltimore  launched the Behavioral health 911 Diversion Pilot Program…

 A report released Wednesday, 10/19, from 97Percent, a bipartisan group of gun owners and non-gun owners that conducts research on gun safety policies, surveyed 1,078 gun owners nationwide to examine their perceptions of specific gun safety policy details…

 Caliber Change Makers Academy was put on lockdown last week after reports of shots fired in the premises of the school…

 Two reports of rape at Stanford University in the last two months have raised issues of how univiersity officials prevent sexual violence, support victims and hold perpetrators accountable, sexual violence prevention advocates…

Texas school districts are set to receive nearly $8 million from the Justice Department to improve campus security this year through funding from the bipartisan gun safety law passed this summer…

Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison last week by a Florida jury for carrying out the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that claimed 17 lives…

 Millions of Texas K-8 students will get identification kits designed for parents to collect fingerprints and DNA to be used in case their kids are in an emergency such as a school shooting…

Between 2014 and 2020, the number of smaller gunmakers — those producing fewer than 50,000 weapons a year — surged 70 percent to more than 4,700, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the most recent federal data…

 The suspect in a string of killings has been charged with three counts of murder in San Joaquin County Superior Court…

 Abusers are less likely to return to abusing their partners if they complete an intervention program required by the courts, according to the California State Auditor, but many of them do not finish the courses…

 Santa Clara County has set aside $2.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of people held in jail long after prosecutors decided not to charge them — sometimes for several days — during a two-year window that coincided with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic…

 A federal judge sentenced longtime Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon to four months in jail for defying a subpoena from lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol…

 President Joe Biden’s administration says it needs more money to bring Jan. 6 rioters to justice…

 The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is expected to issue a subpoena for testimony and documents from former president Donald Trump before the end of the week…

Weekly Update 10/17/22

A recent analysis of about 568,000 patients found that 0.016 percent of COVID-19 patients over 50 who received Paxlovid died…

A new study involving more than 30,000 patients who tested positive for COVID-19 takes another look at the cluster of symptoms associated with long COVID-19…

Federal emergency aid disbursed during the COVID-19 pandemic helped college students stay enrolled in classes…

Chronic absenteeism in public schools surged during the pandemic, which experts say helps explain a historic plunge in student test scores…

The CDC has recommended Pfizer-BioNTech's and Moderna's Omicron-targeting COVID-19 booster shots for children as young as age 5, hours after the FDA granted emergency use authorization to the updated vaccines…

White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha has issued a warning stating that the U.S. should brace itself for a spike in COVID-19 cases this winter as more people will begin to gather indoors…

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has renewed the determination that a public health emergency continues to exist…

The latest point-in-time count of California’s homeless population shows that it increased at roughly the same pace as previous years…

During the pandemic, California’s low-income families that are required to pay a fee to receive subsidized child care got a waiver from paying…

Cyberattacks on school districts happen frequently nationwide…

A new state service program launched last week will give hundreds of undocumented students as much as $10,000 per year to perform community service in areas including K-12 education, food insecurity and climate action…

President Biden says the student debt relief application is officially open, days after the administration began beta testing the website…

Health experts are recommending children and adolescents be screened for anxiety and depression as a step to address the U.S. youth mental health challenges…

Though Biden has vowed support to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Fiona, and paid a visit to the island Monday, 10/10, to demonstrate the administration’s commitment, residents want more than a temporary fix…

More than one million low-income Puerto Ricans are at risk of having their health insurance upended in December when a boost in Medicaid funds expires…

 In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) released proposed changes on September 23, 2022 to the regulations that help elementary and secondary schools and colleges and universities implement this vital legislation…

President Biden on Thursday, 10/6, granted a pardon to all people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law, in what amounts to the most extensive White House action taken to date on U.S. drug policy…

The Biden administration is pushing the message that they can get infrastructure projects done fast…

A maternity care desert is defined by the organization as any county without a hospital or birth center offering obstetric care and without any obstetric providers…

Education Trust is out with a new report on how states can use American Rescue Plan funding to boost teacher diversity…

On Thursday, 10/13, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report revealing that prices rose by 8.2 percent when compared a year ago, and that prices were up by 0.4 percent when compared to last month…

President Biden said a recession in the U,S. is possible but that any downturn would be “very slight” and that the U.S. economy is resilient enough to ride out the turbulence…

Just a quarter of eligible households are taking advantage of a federal program to provide students with free or inexpensive internet access, according to a new report released Tuesday…

The Social Security Administration has announced that Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits for approximately 70 million Amercans will increase 8.7 percent in 2023…

On Friday, 10/14, President Biden signed an executive order that will task U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to use its Innovation Center to work toward lowering drug prices and finding new ways of paying for Medicare services…

A new paper suggests introductory STEM courses disproportionately push underrepresented minority students out of the natural and applied sciences… 

A group of Senate and House Democrats want Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to extend the Public Service Loan Forgiveness waiver to 6/1/23…

High school students resumed taking the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey in school this year and 14 percent of them reported using e-cigarettes…

Leading organizations representing the nation’s colleges and universities on Wednesday, 10/12, urged their members to “closely examine” their policies on withholding student transcripts as federal regulators move to crack down on the practice…

Charter schools that received federal funding for start-up costs were less likely to close within five years than those without the financial boost, according to a new report from a government watchdog group…

In September, the National Coalition for Public School Options released the results of a national survey that revealed 71 percent of parents surveyed sent their children to their local district public school while 61 percent believe those schools are headed in the wrong direction, including urban residents, at 67 percent…

Last month, California Community Colleges missed the deadline to achieve academic goals of narrowing the graduation rate gap by 40 percent among its Black, Latino, and white students in five years…

Immigration Update 10/13/22

On October 5, a federal appeals court ruled against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program…

The 10/5 ruling ratchets up pressure for Congress to pass legislation providing “Dreamers” more stable legal status…

A proposal to offer status to Afghan evacuees may hitch a ride on the omnibus spending bill or the defense package…

Yesterday, 10/12, the Biden administration announced it would accept up to 24,000 Venezuelans via a humanitarian parole plan, although the scope of the program was far narrower than a similar one for Ukrainians…

The DHS plans to issue more than the maximum 64,000 additional H-2B temporary work visas on top of the normal annual allocation in the current fiscal year…

The U.S. received approximately 25,400 refugees under the Refugee Admissions Program, which resettles the most vulnerable immigrants displaced by war and violence across the globe…

For the first time, the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants along the southwestern border exceeded two million in one year…

In early September, the Department of Homeland Security finalized a regulation rolling back a policy instituted under former President Trump that sought to limit immigration benefits for those likely to rely on government aid…

There are among an estimated 200,000 children of immigrants on work visas who don’t have a clear legal path to stay in the U.S. once they turn 21…

In mid-July, after a Texas district judge said the guidance to deportation officers violated federal laws, the Supreme Court refused to reinstate the Biden administration’s policy limiting immigration arrests…

In late June, the Supreme Court ruled on behalf of the Biden administration, reversing a Trump-era initiative that requires asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases are reviewed in U.S. courts…

Public Safety Update 10/7/22

A federal judge blocked portions of a new New York gun law on 10/6…

According to a poll conducted 9/27-10/3, U.S. voters prefer Republicans over Democrats for solving immigration and crime problems… 

The House passed bipartisan legislation to increase funding for local police departments…

The U.S. Interior Department launched a set of new policies that requires thousands of police officers to wear body cameras… 

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) revoked gun store licenses at a higher rate in 2022 than in any year since 2006…

A group called 97Percent strives to engage gun owners in the national conversation about gun law reform…

Murders and shootings increased in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, however, these trends reversed in 2022…

Incarcerated youth from Louisiana deemed the most troubled and aggressive could be moved to a building on the grounds of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the country’s largest and most notorious maximum security prisons for adults…

New safety protocols including checkpoints and extra security are in place as students returned to an Oakland campus on Wednesday, 10/5, one week after a school shooting that injured six people…

The killings of five men in Central California may be related…

A new law will allow Californians to seal old arrests and convictions from their official records in an effort to give them a fresh start…

Boys are falling behind in school, disconnected from family, vulnerable to opioid abuse and to deaths of despair at higher rates than girls…

Weekly CA-COVID Update 10/4/22

California

Young adults in California experience mental health challenges at alarming rates, with more than three-quarters reporting anxiety in the last year, more than half reporting depression, 31 percent experiencing suicidal thinking and 16 percent self-harm, according to the results of a survey commissioned by the California Endowment…

California governor Gavin Newsom signed multiple pieces of legislation Friday, 9/30, to improve higher education in the state for certain underserved student populations…

California’s most vexing budget problem of the summer was how to spend a record surplus…

Deputy Schools Superintendent Malia Vella's pledge that the department will release the scores next month comes in the wake of a report last week that raised the possibility state officials might not release the data until after the November election…

After its driest three-year stretch on record, California braces for another year with below-average snow and rain…

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Friday, 9/30, a bill to further reform remedial education at California community colleges…

Gov. Newsom is calling for California regulators to speed up the transition to cheaper winter-blend gasoline as prices at the pump keep rising…

The San Joaquin Valley could see the greatest impact from a law meant to make it easier for farmworkers to vote in union elections, a regional labor expert said…

The killing sparked outrage as yet another example of unwarranted deadly force by US law enforcement…

Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Sen. Brian Dahle, will face off at KQED on 10/23, after Dahle yesterday, 10/3,  accepted an invitation to debate the incumbent Democrat…

Coronavirus

Yesterday, 10/3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it had ended its COVID-19 country travel health notices as fewer countries reported enough data for accurate assessments…