Phoenix Police Department (PPD) leadership informed city council that they may have to stop responding to certain 911 calls due to their shortage of police officers. PPD Chief Jeri Williams shared with the Public Safety and Justice Subcommittee at the start of this month that they haven’t made such a policy official yet, but may have to in order to offset the workload created by 370 vacancies.
They had 27 recruits going through academy and 31 officers-in-training. PPD has 2,755 total officers. The fifth-largest city in the nation had over 1.6 million people according to the 2020 census — approximately 17 officers per 10,000 residents.
The proposal was based on a study from Arizona State University (ASU). The university identified eleven call types: intrusion alarms, assisting fire departments with unruly patients, drug overdoses, loose animals, public marijuana smoking, civil matter stand-bys, abandoned vehicles, found property, minor vehicle crashes without injuries, illegal parking, and noise complaints. Williams suggested that the last six call types could be mitigated by civilian members or assistants and not PPD, and that public marijuna smoking calls were nullified with the legalization of marijuana.
Williams suggested that eliminating police response to intrusion or false alarms, fire department assistance and/or check welfare calls, drug overdoses, and loose animals wouldn’t be good for public safety. PPD recorded 60,000 welfare calls and 552 drug overdose calls.
Civil matter stand-by calls have to do with incidents like exchanges of children, roommate relationships, and merchant or customer relations. Williams reported that PPD received about 14,000 of civil matter stand-by calls annually, 10,000 abandoned vehicle calls, 3,200 found property calls, 26,000 minor vehicle accidents without injury calls, 10,000 minor vehicle hit-and-run, 6,200 illegal parking calls, and 14,000 noise complaint calls.
Overall, Williams reported that PPD received 2 million calls in 2020 with 660,000 of those dispatched, and 1.8 million calls in 2021 with about 614,000 of those dispatched.
“This is just preliminary information that we’re going through. We didn’t want you all or members of the public to be surprised by the types of calls we’re looking at. We’ve made no decisions on these whatsoever, we’re really just trying to introduce the topic and idea,” explained Williams.
The second adjustment was PPD’s new “deferred patrol response” program where officers come into the station and work overtime by assisting with calls, taking reports, and handling paperwork.
The third adjustment was changes to PPD’s dispatch protocol concerned changes to dispatch protocols.
In all, Williams touched on six different improvement efforts: in addition to call type reduction, deferred patrol response, and dispatch protocol changes, PPD has undertaken programs implementing civilianization, body worn cameras for all officers, and specialty back to patrol. PPD also introduced efforts to increase officer retention and morale, such as raises.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
At the end of September, three female students took it upon themselves to defend an unofficially-established multicultural center at the Arizona State University (ASU) Tempe campus by segregating those unwelcome in the longtime common room: white males with what appeared to be differing political beliefs. After two of the students, Sarra Tekola and Mastaani Qureshi, received a punishment of a reflection essay and light warning from the university, the activist pair spoke out in a video posted last week to the Instagram page for their activist group, the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition (MSC). The third student involved, Miriam “Mimi” Araya, wasn’t found guilty of any code of conduct violations.
In their nine-minute video, Tekola and Qureshi claimed that ASU was toxic and a training ground for Nazis and white supremacy. Two ASU professors submitted videos to support the activist pair: English professor Lee Bebout and School of Social Transformation Director Camilla Fojas.
At the time of the incident, ASU claimed to AZ Free News that the three women were engaged in a “disagreement” highlighting “differences of opinion” that were “part of the university experience.” Then, AZ Free News reported last month that the women were being investigated for code of conduct violations.
When the three women recorded their confrontation with two white male students, they demanded that the pair leave because they were white, male, and displaying perceived controversial political messaging: a ‘Police Lives Matter’ sticker, a Bass Pro Shop hat, a Chick-fil-A cup, and a ‘Did Not Vote for Biden’ t-shirt. The three women called the pair “racist” and “Karens,” while accusing them of promoting murderers and white supremacy.
A week prior to their exhortation video against ASU, MSC lamented that the university continued to uphold “respectability politics.” That concept claims that marginalized groups shouldn’t adhere to any cultural or political norms of their oppressors in attempts to reconcile differences.
The following are the complete remarks from Tekola and Qureshi’s video complaint:
Qureshi: On September 23, hateful and racist symbology invaded our Multicultural Center on ASU’s Tempe Campus, and made the center unsafe for BIPOC [Black Indigenous People of Color] students who were trying to study. The two white men, both students, displayed a ‘Police Lives Matter’ sticker, a Bass Pro hat, a Chick-fil-A cup, and an anti-Biden t-shirt.
Tekola: The Police Lives Matter sticker was on one of the white man’s laptop, [sic] laptop which was clearly directed towards a black woman who was leading the black study tables across from him, as the boys chose to sit across from the black study tables. The boys made the space uncomfortable with their nonverbal, aggressive gestures directed towards the black women. The students called for help from ASU but no one came for over 30 minutes, so we were forced to confront these men by ourselves.
Qureshi: After this incident we received thousands of rape, death, and lynching threats on our personal Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and email accounts. It has been more than two months since the incident, and Zarra and I receive these threats every single day.
Tekola: ASU was aware of how we were getting doxxed and suffering psychological and emotional violence by white supremacists across the country, but it still did not protect us. Instead, they launched an investigation against us and we had to mobilize the community to protect ourselves from being kicked out by the institution. ASU’s investigation found us guilty of interfering with university activities.
Qureshi and Tekola: Dear white people: aka, ASU.
Qureshi: You openly discriminated against us on November 16 when you handed down your decision from your racially biased investigation. We are being persecuted for defending our Multicultural Center from racism and sexism. You gave us two punishments: the first one was a warning, and the second one as to write a three page paper on how next time when we talk with white people about race and society we will be civil.
Tekola: This video is a fulfillment of our educational intervention. We are going to give ASU an educational intervention on why telling students of color at ASU to be more civil in the face of white supremacy and neo-Nazism on this campus is actually violent.
Qureshi: ASU is a violent place. Just last week there was an Islamaphobic attack at ASU in which pages from Quran Majeed, the holiest book for Mulsims, were ripped apart and burned for Muslim students to find in the interfaith room. The interfaith room is they only place on campus where Muslim students are told they should pray in. Meanwhile there are multiple small rooms in the multicultural center at ASU Tempe that Muslim women, who are looking for a private place to pray in, are locked out of. We are told the reason that Musllim women cannot use those small spaces to pray in is because it would not be equal.
Tekola: You see, this is the problem: ASU does not understand the difference between equity and equality. And ASU refuses to center the most marginalized. In addition to that hate crime, around October 31 another hate crime happened at ASU Tempe where anti-Semitism flyers littered the campus. These flyers had an ASU registered student club, the College Republicans United, on the flyer. This is the same club that raised money for Kyle Rittenhouse, and these are just the attacks that happened since our own viral incident on September 23. This tells you a little bit about the type of environment, the toxic place that ASU wants us to be civil in.
[clip of Tekola speaking at a protest]: I have come to MLK’s conclusion that I have integrated my people into a burning building. ASU is on fire. For years, ASU has refused to put out a statement condemning white supremacy after being used as a recruiting ground for Nazis, breeding the culture of hate on this campus. They claim it is because of ‘free speech,’ and yet we students of color are being punished for our free speech. I am being punished for being too black, too proud, too loud, and unapologetic. I am being punished for not adopting their respectability politics, but I don’t need respectability politics. I am a foreign fellow appointed by President Crowe himself to the African Advisory Council. I achieved all this while refusing to tone down my blackness to make white people feel more comfortable. Our center has been infiltrated by Trump supporters, and ASU is telling us ‘there’s nothing we can do.’ ASU refuses to protect students of color and the world needs to know how they treat us here on this campus when we push to make it a better place for all.
Bebout (in a clip): Calls for civil dialogue can be weaponized in two critical ways. First, if a white person actively trolls and provokes an encounter but does so in a relatively complicit way — say they enter a space meant to foreground the experiences of people of color, and these folks deploy a rhetoric meant to diminish black and queer lives — as long as the trolling is plausibly deniable to an ideologically white-oriented audience, that any pushback that the white individuals receive may be cast as aggression. The act of instigation itself would be erased, and the instigators will be cast as victims, and the people who seek to defend themselves will be seen as oppressors, uncivil, harassers. Second, because of the way in which civil and rational dialogue is racially coded, when white-aligned institutions call for people of color to be civil to interlocutors that have no interest in earnestly engaging and listening; whether intentionally or not, these institutions are asking people of color and other aggrieved communities to be quieter. They are asking them to be less vociferous in their defense of their personhood. In other words, calls for civility easily become calls for docility: a submission to the way things are, as opposed to a vocal defense of the world as it should be.
Qureshi (in two separate clips from speeches at protests): ASU is angry at me, and wants me to put me back in my place as a brown woman. ASU is punishing us for standing up for our friends and other students of color. ASU is punishing us for telling two white boys that only one room on campus is not going to center them. […] If you all didn’t see it yesterday, the provost of this university, Nancy Gonzales, sent out a statement yesterday in response to the 3,511-plus messages received in support of us. In her statement, Nancy Gonzales tries to sympathize with Zarra, Mimi, and I and assures everyone that ASU is handling this case with cultural awareness. But in her statement, she misspells my first name! How are you going to support me if you even can’t spell my first name correctly on an appropriate statement. This is the level of care ASU has for us: they’re insensitive to Pakistani and Muslim cultures. They want us to turn in a written statement by December 15 explaining how we will be civil and how, and I quote, ‘You might approach such a situation in the future to facilitate a civil dialogue on the purpose of the MC [Multicultural Center] or the topics of race and society are addressed in this confrontation.’ They want me to be civil! They’re calling me a savage! This is what white people did when they came to my country and they colonized us for 270 years!
Fojas (in a clip): […] I think their reaction was justified and was equal to the symbolic violence that these students and their presence and the symbols that were brought into the space represented.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Arizona jumped to the national forefront of telehealth in May 2021 when Gov. Doug Ducey signed emergency legislation that dramatically expanded options for accessing safe and reliable health care services.
“Our state now has the broadest telemedicine law in the nation, providing greater opportunity for safe and reliable medical services,” Ducey’s office noted Wednesday in a “2021 Year in Review” statement. “Expansive telehealth helps all Arizonans, especially low-income families and those living in rural areas, connect with their medical providers.”
Telehealth or telemedicine is the use of digital technology -devices such as computers, telephones, smartphones, and tablets- to access health care services without needing to be in the same room or even the same state as the medical provider.
In May 2020, the health care consulting firm McKinsey & Company noted the total annual revenue of U.S. telehealth players was an estimated $3 billion prior to COVID-19. That U.S. revenue stream could jump in a post-pandemic market to $250 billion as health care services continue to shift to a telehealth platform, or what they refer to as virtual or virtually-enabled care.
A July 2021 updated report by McKinsey & Company noted the utilization of virtual care services is now 38 times higher than before COVID-19. This change has been driven by an increased willingness of consumers / patients to embrace telehealth, as well as an increased willingness of providers to offer such services.
And as seen in Arizona, another key factor in the growth of telehealth is the regulatory and statutory changes, which enable greater access and reimbursement.
“Patients and medical professionals know what’s best for their needs, and we’re working to make sure they have access to those services,” Ducey said when signing the legislation in the spring.
The governor pointed at the time to the benefits for vulnerable populations and the fact snowbirds visiting Arizona could receive telemedicine from their home state due to Arizona’s new law. In addition, doctors are assured equal compensation from insurance companies for telemedicine services.
Meanwhile, McKinsey & Company noted in July that investor activity continues to grow at record levels.
“Investment in virtual health continues to accelerate,” the firm noted in its July update, adding that total venture capital investment into the digital health space in the first half of 2021 totaled $14.7 billion. That is more than all of the investment in 2020 ($14.6 billion) and nearly twice the investment in 2019 ($7.7 billion), the update noted.
The University of Arizona’s College of Medicine operates the Arizona Telemedicine and Telehealth Center. It provides telemedicine services, distance learning, informatics training, and telemedicine technology assessment capabilities to communities throughout Arizona.
For a long time, school board elections have been one of the easiest to ignore. Maybe it’s because the names on the ballot don’t stand out as much as the candidates for President, Governor, or U.S. Senate. Maybe it’s because people are too busy to research the candidates. Or maybe it’s because voters who don’t have kids—or whose kids are not in public school—don’t see how school board elections can affect them.
But if 2021 has taught us anything, it’s that even the smallest election has consequences. And nowhere has that been more obvious than with the leftist agendas that have taken over Arizona’s school districts this past year.
Those behind and in support of masking requirements who have deemed cloth and medical masks satisfactory these past 22 months are now saying they’re no longer ideal. Instead, experts have begun calling for an “upgrade” of sorts. University of Arizona (UArizona) Public Health Policy and Management Director Joe Gerald is one such health expert; he toldKOLD that individuals should wear masks graded KN95 or higher, in addition to getting vaccinated.
“[People should be] making more careful decisions about how you interact these next few weeks, wearing a mask that’s upgraded to KN95 or higher,” said Gerald. “Public health right now is a hard sell. We are two years into this, many of the things we’re asking people to do require a sacrifice of self to others, and it’s a hard message even in good times. […] You’re not going to be able to convince everyone to do the right thing all the time, but you’re trying to get more people to do the right thing more of the time.”
Gerald has provided his expert opinion frequently throughout the pandemic to both policymakers and news outlets. Near the beginning of the pandemic, the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) appointed Gerald to a task force charged with creating a model to predict COVID-19 spread. Gerald’s model predicted that the least amount of COVID-19 cases would occur by waiting to reopen fully until the end of May.
In early May, ADHS disbanded the task force. Instead, ADHS reportedly opted to use a then-undisclosed federal model from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The ADHS director at the time, Dr. Cara Christ, published the FEMA model later that month. Unlike the version offered by Gerald’s task force, the FEMA model didn’t account for the lifting of mitigative measures.
Gerald also predicted to reporters last June that the state would run out of hospital and ICU beds within weeks; that didn’t happen. All throughout last year Gerald pushed against UArizona’s reopening last fall for in-person class, tellingCNN last Julythat it was “a really stupid idea.” Last October, Gerald explained to The Atlantic how he’d successfully rallied UArizona to slow its reopening for in-person classes.
Gerald’s latest recommendation followed Pima County’s health department and board of supervisors implementation of another mask mandate last week. Individuals must wear masks indoors when six feet of social distancing can’t be maintained. The mandate’s enforcement measures relied on A.R.S. § 36-183.04 through § 36-183.07, as well as § 36-191. Individuals who fail to adhere to a compliance order may be charged a civil penalty up to $750, or $1,000 in one day and up to $10,000 per violation depending on the course of action undertaken by health officials. Enterprises who violate health edicts may owe up to $5,000; those who hold a valid permit could be guilty of a class 3 misdemeanor, and the permitless could be guilty of a class 2 misdemeanor. However, the supervisors noted that any civil or criminal enforcement action couldn’t be undertaken without their approval.
The shift in masking narrative hasn’t been exclusive to the Pima County area: health experts and other Democrat-run areas across the country have been shifting theirs as well. Instead of cloth masks, the new, improved standard for masking has graduated to filtering facepiece respirators (FFPs) — masks graded KN95 or higher.
Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont announced Monday that their state would distribute at-home COVID-19 tests and N95 masks beginning Thursday.
As of guidance last updated in October, the CDC recommended cloth masks and advised against N95 masks. Their recommendation was based on the need to reserve N95 masks for health care personnel.
On Monday, the CDC announced that it would halve the recommended quarantine period from ten to five days. Infected individuals must be asymptomatic and wear a mask around others to receive the shortened quarantine period. The CDC recommended the same for those exposed yet uninfected, even for the unvaccinated or more than six months out from their last COVID-19 vaccination; yet, that same class of individuals may also be permitted to avoid quarantine altogether by masking for ten days, if quarantining isn’t feasible and they test negative after day five of exposure.
The CDC claimed their decision was “motivated by science.” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky emphasized that the new priority was a safe continuance of regular life.
“CDC’s updated recommendations for isolation and quarantine balance what we know about the spread of the virus and the protection provided by vaccination and booster doses. These updates ensure people can safely continue their daily lives,” stated Walensky. “Prevention is our best option: get vaccinated, get boosted, wear a mask in public indoor settings in areas of substantial and high community transmission, and take a test before you gather.”
CDC has shortened the recommended time for #COVID19 isolation and quarantine. Learn more about what to do if you test positive or have close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19: https://t.co/ScxsyrZI16.
It’s unlikely the CDC’s sudden change in COVID-19 mitigation protocol originated within the government. Rather, the push from large corporations may have prompted the change.
Nearly a week earlier, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian asked Walensky in a request letter to halve the required ten-day quarantine period for his fully vaccinated workers experiencing breakthrough COVID-19 infections. Bastian claimed that data on the Omicron variant suggested the virus was 25 to 50 percent more contagious but less virulent and with shorter incubation and infection periods for the fully vaccinated. According to the CEO, over 90 percent of Delta Airlines’ workforce has been vaccinated.
Bastian also proposed a partnership, offering up his medical experts to work alongside the government and “collect empirical data.” The CEO classified his workers as essential, equating their necessity to health care workers, police officers, firefighters, and public transportation workers.
“Our employees represent an essential workforce to enable Americans who need to travel domestically and internationally. With the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, the 10-day isolation for those who are fully vaccinated may significantly impact our workforce and operation,” wrote Bastian. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with the CDC to protect the health and safety of our people, customers, and communities as the pandemic evolves.”
Six days ago, the CEO of Delta airlines requested the quarantine period for COVID infections be halved to five days, to ease the burden on their workforce.
