CYFD data shows youth violence has declined in Santa Fe, region
Charges against youth dipped in 2020 during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, and data from the region shows they have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. Weapons violations have showed an uptick in recent years since the initial drop.
Charges of assault and battery were about four times higher in the early 2000s throughout the district than they have been for several years. Charges of sex crimes, property crimes and probation violations against youth have also dropped.
The district saw 680 offenses total against youth in 2024, with 29% of those charges considered "violent" by the child welfare department.
While criminal charges against youth have been dropping districtwide, statistics from Santa Fe police in recent years show increasing reports of most types of violent crimes and property crimes.
Over the last two years, Santa Fe police have found at least nine Santa Fe Public Schools students in possession of weapons on campus, four of them firearms. Six of those incidents led to felony charges against the students.
Despite the statistical drop, the issue of youth violence has risen in prominence in Santa Fe in recent years amid many high-profile cases. The city and county governments have sought and distributed grant funding to local nonprofits for programs aiming to prevent violence and divert children from the criminal legal system.
City Youth and Family Services Department staff presented details about ongoing programs to a City Council committee last week. The department has distributed almost $1 million in federal funding to local groups in recent years, including YouthWorks, New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, Esperanza Shelter and a restorative justice program at Santa Fe Public Schools.
Santa Fe police Chief Paul Joye told the committee he and his officers were encountering fewer youth on their calls in the city.
Department Director Julie Sanchez told the committee she believes success for the city's violence interruption programs would be "seeing a reduction in youth crime, specifically gun violence and interpersonal violence."
Sanchez said she expects to see results from the city's efforts in five to seven years.
"Change is incremental," she said. "We're talking about not only addressing issues but creating cultural shifts and social shifts."
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San Francisco Chronicle
a minute ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Tennessee set to execute inmate without turning off his implanted defibrillator
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee is set to execute an inmate Tuesday without deactivating his implanted defibrillator, as uncertainty lingers about whether the device will shock his heart when a lethal drug takes effect. Barring a late reprieve requested from the governor or the courts, Byron Black's execution will go forward after a legal back-and-forth over whether the state would need to turn off his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD. The nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center said it's unaware of any other cases in which an inmate was making similar claims to Black about ICDs or pacemakers. The execution would be Tennessee's second since May, after a pause for five years, first because of COVID-19 and then because of missteps by the Tennessee Department of Correction. Twenty-seven men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and nine other people are scheduled to be put to death in seven states during the remainder of 2025. The number of executions this year exceeds the 25 carried out last year and in 2018. It is the highest total since 2015, when 28 people were put to death. Black's condition Black, 69, is in a wheelchair, suffering from dementia, brain damage, kidney failure, congestive heart failure and other conditions, his attorneys have said. In mid-July, a trial court judge agreed with Black's attorneys that officials must have the instrument deactivated to avert the risk that it could cause unnecessary pain and prolong the execution. But the state Supreme Court intervened July 31 to overturn that decision, saying the other judge lacked the authority to order the change. The state has disputed that the lethal injection would cause Black's defibrillator to shock him. Even if shocks were triggered, Black wouldn't feel them, the state has added. Black's attorneys have countered that even if the lethal drug being used, pentobarbital, renders someone unresponsive, they aren't necessarily unaware or unable to feel pain. Black's case Black was convicted in the 1988 shooting deaths of his girlfriend Angela Clay, 29, and her two daughters, Latoya Clay, 9, and Lakeisha Clay, 6. Prosecutors said he was in a jealous rage when he shot the three at their home. At the time, Black was on work-release while serving time for shooting Clay's estranged husband. Linette Bell, whose sister and two nieces were killed, recently told WKRN-TV: 'He didn't have mercy on them, so why should we have mercy on him?' 'It feels like it is never-ending,' Bell told the news outlet. 'They aren't even resting in their own grave.' Medical considerations An implantable cardioverter-defibrillator is a small, battery-powered electronic device that is surgically implanted in the chest, typically near the left collarbone. It serves as a pacemaker and an emergency defibrillator. Black's attorneys say the only way to be sure it's off is for a doctor to place a programming device over the implant site, sending it a deactivation command, with no surgery required. The legal case also spurred a reminder that most medical professionals consider participation in executions a violation of health care ethics. While the judge's order to deactivate the device was in place, state officials said Nashville General Hospital practitioners would do the procedure the day before at the hospital, but wouldn't travel to the prison on execution day as the court required. The judge offered some leeway, allowing the procedure at the hospital on the morning of the execution. But Nashville General then released a statement saying the state's contractor didn't reach out to proper hospital leadership and that there had been no agreement to do the work. Intellectual disability claim In recent years, Black's legal team has also tried and failed to get a new hearing over whether he is intellectually disabled and ineligible for the death penalty under U.S. Supreme Court precedent. His attorneys have said that if they had delayed a prior attempt to seek his intellectual disability claim, he would have been spared under a 2021 state law. Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk contended in 2022 that Black is intellectually disabled and deserves a hearing under that 2021 law, but the judge denied it. That is because an inmate can't get an intellectual disability hearing under the 2021 law if they have already filed a similar request and a court has ruled on it 'on the merits." In Funk's attempt, he focused on input from an expert for the state in 2004 who determined back then that Black didn't meet the criteria for what was then called "mental retardation.' But she concluded that Black met the new law's criteria for a diagnosis of intellectual disability.
New York Post
5 hours ago
- New York Post
How the ‘social justice' movement distorted what Kyle Rittenhouse really did
Five summers ago, with no end to the coronavirus pandemic in sight and a pent-up desire to rebel against the spectacle of police violence in the wake of George Floyd's videotaped death, cities across the country exploded in rioting and arson. With the confluence of the threat of COVID-19, the ongoing racial reckoning, and the specter of President Trump's re-election campaign rendering even the smallest considerations and disagreements hyper-partisan, the nation's media, political and cultural institutions grew single-mindedly focused on an overly simplistic story of 'social justice' and 'antiracism.' In 'Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse,' (Knopf, out August 5) Thomas Chatterton Williams, a staff writer at The Atlantic, paints a clear and detailed picture of the pivotal ideas and events that paved the way for the dramatic paradigm shift that changed the country in the summer of 2020 and helped make possible the astonishing backlash still unfolding today. Here, an excerpt. When a doughy 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse, too young to purchase the AR-15 he'd strapped across himself, ventured from his home in Antioch, Ill., into the burning streets of Kenosha, Wis., he was doing many things simultaneously. He was placing himself in a deranged situation that shouldn't have unfolded to begin with. And, in doing so, his very armed presence became a further provocation, heightening the danger for himself and everyone around him. But he was also attempting, however misguidedly, to make his community safer. 7 In the summer of 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse, then 17, strapped on an AR-15 in an misguided attempt to keep Wisconsin streets safe. AP Advertisement On the morning of Aug. 25, 2020, two drastically divergent white lives inched inexorably closer to conflict. As Rittenhouse took up with a makeshift cleanup crew, Joseph Rosenbaum was discharged from the Aurora psychiatric hospital, outside Milwaukee. A deeply troubled 36-year-old with an extensive criminal record — including recent domestic violence against his fiancée and prior sexual assault of minors — whom the hospital had deposited in the middle of Kenosha's pandemonium, Rosenbaum attempted to retrieve his belongings from the police station, only to find it shuttered because of the ongoing melee. He continued on to Walgreens to procure his medication, but the store had also been closed due to the protests. Meanwhile, Rittenhouse prepared to join another crew that evening at the Car Source auto lot, which had been set ablaze the previous evening. As night descended, Rosenbaum left the motel where his fiancée was living and Rittenhouse was filmed standing guard outside the dealership with a gathering group of armed men, people he describes as complete strangers who had also come to protect local businesses. Advertisement 7 Kenosha, Wisconsin, erupted in protests and flames after the shooting of James Blake. AFP via Getty Images Rittenhouse speaks affably with citizen journalists live streaming the protests on social media. 'People are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business, and part of my job is also to help people,' he says unaffectedly. 'If there's somebody hurt, I'm running into harm's way. That's why I have my rifle, because I need to protect myself obviously. But I also have my med kit.' Mid-conversation, he looks up and shouts, 'Medical, EMS right here, do you need assistance? I am an EMT,' and rushes out of frame. An hour before midnight, in the claustrophobic lot of the Ultimate Convenience Center, Rosenbaum emerges for the first time on video. Head shaved to a polish, fluorescent stud jutting from his earlobe, and a look of fury tinged on his troubled countenance, his compact figure berates and even butts into much larger men with long guns. Rosenbaum looks and sounds not fearless but reckless. 'Don't point no motherf–king gun at me, homey!' he screams one moment before quickly changing tacks: 'Shoot me, n—a! Shoot me, n—a! Bust on me, n—a! For real!' he taunts the militia members without getting a rise, in the process embodying some of the strangest, most thoroughly American racial alchemy that is as familiar to me as it would be inscrutable to someone foreign born. Advertisement 7 The Kenosha protests were part of what Thomas Chatterton Williams dubs the 'Summer of Our Discontent,' which is the title of his new book. Thomas Brunot It is the kind of subtlety the blunt mainstream narrative around blackness, whiteness and antiracism is so ill-equipped to convey accurately, or even to recognize in the first place, and so it is ignored. I have seen no evidence in the hours of footage from that night to indicate the militiamen themselves had treated the protesters they encountered with racial prejudice. It is Rosenbaum alone who has deployed the n-word. But he does not do so pejoratively, at least not regarding black people. Many of the black men standing nearby register the epithet yet take no exception to it, even as they protectively move to restrain him — a white man who is out of control and in conflict solely with other white men. Soon Rosenbaum is shoving a flaming dumpster toward the idle gas pumps, as scores of bystanders do nothing, filming this act of patent lunacy from a distance. One young man has the sense to douse the flames with a fire extinguisher. Advertisement 7 Rittenhouse shot and killed two men. Joseph Rosenbaum (above), a deeply troubled 36-year-old with an extensive criminal record, was one of them. The professional police forces appear sporadically in armored vehicles and weakly address the combustible crowd through loudspeakers. Whereas Rittenhouse and the other armed civilians are physically present in the streets, inserting their bodies into the commotion, law enforcement officers are just as good as absent. Both Rittenhouse and Rosenbaum, who has now removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a desert nomad, are among the hundreds of men and women told to disperse on Sheridan Road, the main artery. 'Back away from the business, back away from the business,' an officer commands from the safety of his tank's interior. Rosenbaum is seen among the crowd, swinging a metal chain. Officers slow to a crawl and toss Rittenhouse and his colleagues bottled water through the roof hatch of an armored truck. 'We appreciate you guys, we really do,' the disembodied voice from the loudspeaker intones. 7 Rittenhouse also fatally shot 26-year-old Anthony Huber (above). There is something shameful, darkly comical and infuriating about this exchange. Law enforcement has outsourced the task of keeping fuel pumps from exploding to improvising adolescents. These police are spectators, watching a 17-year-old attempt to save them. Fifteen minutes later, the streets still buzz, protesters linger, restlessly scrolling their phones. Rittenhouse walks among this multiracial assembly and asks, 'Medical, does anybody need medical?' He is rebuffed by a couple of men in masks and continues onward to an intersection. Officers, who have used their vehicles to corral the mob southward, prevent him from resuming his post in front of Car Source. At 11:44, reports that rioters are trying to set on fire yet more cars at another lot come across the scanners. 'We've seen at least four people with handguns running around here,' a dispatcher warns. Two minutes after that, Rittenhouse is filmed holding a fire extinguisher, running from the gas station before slowing to a walk. Rosenbaum follows, picking up his pace, closing the distance between them. He throws his bag of belongings at him. Then the night cracks with a nearby gunshot. Four more shots in quick succession scatter the crowd into a frenzy. The camera shakes. Rittenhouse, who's been separated from his colleagues, runs in circles around a parked car. Another three-round burst, and as the focus resumes, he remains standing and Rosenbaum has fallen. 7 Rittenhouse turned himself in, telling officers that he had 'shot two white kids.' AP Advertisement The latter's limp body is hoisted into an SUV. Rittenhouse makes a phone call, then begins to flee. The crowd has grown attuned to him in unison, with tragically imperfect information, reacting to the presence of what seems to be an active shooter, as rumor pulses through it. 'What did he do?' one man shouts, chasing after Rittenhouse, who stumbles onto his back in the middle of the thoroughfare. Four masked white men are upon him, one drop-kicking him in the chest before another smacks his head with a skateboard. Rittenhouse receives the blows and shoots the skater in the process, killing him. A third approaches, raising a handgun, and Rittenhouse fires another round, blowing apart his forearm. He stands. The remaining bystanders give a wide berth now, and he shuffles down the street back to the gas station, where a cluster of police vehicles, lights flashing, slowly approach — far too late to be of use to anyone. Hands raised, he attempts to turn himself in, but the armored vehicles drive right past him. Even though the shooter and each of his three targets, as well as the instigating crowd around them, are white, dispatchers relay a description of the gunman as 'black.' Rittenhouse leaves the scene, returning home to his mother. She drives him to the police department in Antioch at 1:20 a.m., where he attempts to turn himself in a second time, vomiting in the precinct lobby and telling officers that he had 'shot two white kids.' 7 The tidy narrative branded Rittenhouse a 'racist killer.' Thomas Chatterton Williams writes, 'In the context of the summer of 2020, what had happened among four white men could never be understood as unfortunate or tragic or even simply illegal; it was racist.' AP Advertisement 'Kenosha: Teen Charged with Murder After Two Black Lives Matter Protesters Killed,' read one headline in The Guardian. In the context of the summer of 2020, what had happened among four white men could never be understood as unfortunate or tragic or even simply illegal; it was racist. Rosenbaum had been elevated posthumously to the status of 'a Black Lives Matter activist.' The specific and complicated causes and effects that produced the awful violence of August 25 — all of which contradict the notion that these were primarily peaceful demonstrations — much like the particularities of the police shooting of Jacob Blake that had preceded it, had been reconfigured into a tidier narrative. Excerpted from 'Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse' (Knopf, August 5, 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Washington Post
5 hours ago
- Washington Post
Islamic State-linked fighters displace over 46,000 people in northern Mozambique, UN says
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Attacks by insurgents in Mozambique's northern Cabo Delgado province displaced more than 46,000 people in the space of eight days last month, the United Nations migration agency said Monday. The International Organization for Migration said nearly 60% of those forced from their homes were children. There have been no reports of deaths in the attacks.
