The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: fresno
Fort Worth Police at the scene of a violent crime.

Murder Rate Rose In Republican Cities, Too

If you're worried by the rise in violent crime — a real and troubling phenomenon — don't ask Republicans for solutions. All they can offer is a blame game that relies on dubious cherry-picked data. To get their message, just glance at Breitbart.com, the home of hard-right hackery: "Violent Crime Surges 25 Percent in 2021 With Democrats in Washington." You can find dozens of similar headlines across right-wing platforms, which invariably announce "skyrocketing crime rates in Dem-run cities." (Stay tuned for grainy video of a disturbing attack.)

Then there's former President Donald Trump himself, the loudest presidential loser in history, blathering fantastical statistics that are meant to show how dangerous life is in America now that he's gone.

Such assertions may momentarily satisfy the two-minute anger ritual that substitutes for critical thinking among the Republican base. Whenever something bad is happening, it can only be the result of a conspiracy implicating Democrats, immigrants, minorities, immigrants and minorities in cities — and preferably all of the above. Rising crime fulfills both the cynical strategy of Republican politicians and the primitive emotions of their voters.

But should you wish to understand what's actually happening, not only in major cities but in towns and counties of every size, then it's worth examining data beyond the Republican talking points.

Murder rates are indeed going up in cities around the country. And because most cities are governed by Democratic mayors, it is accurate to say that violent crime rates are rising in "Democrat-run cities." But, as the Republicans parroting that line of propaganda know, it's also accurate to say that violent crime is rising in "Republican-led cities."

While the murder rate has gone up in Chicago and Detroit and Philadelphia, all run by Democrats, the murder rate has likewise gone up in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; in Fort Worth, Texas; in Fresno, California; and in Miami, Florida. Every one of those cities is run by a Republican mayor and overseen by a Republican governor.

Jacksonville, Florida, is known as the "murder capital" of the Sunshine State — and has had a Republican mayor for the past six years. Fort Worth survived its most violent year in the past quarter century in 2020, with a murder rate that nearly doubled from the previous year. Betsy Price has been the city's Republican mayor for the past 10 years.

The point is not, of course, that Republican mayors are culpable for the shocking upsurge in violence that beset their cities last year — nor were they probably responsible for the sharp drops in crime that the entire country experienced over the past two decades. The underlying causes of crime rates, whether trending up or down, have puzzled criminologists, cops and other honest experts for many years.

Equally inaccurate is the claim that "defund the police" — a wrongheaded and confusing slogan briefly popular in the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder — has sparked the growing number of urban killings. But the data show clearly that the same trend is evident across cities, whether they increased or decreased police funding. Even stupid slogans don't kill people.

Guns do kill, however — and among the suggestive statistics of the pandemic is the alarming national flood of firearms purchases. While most crime remains relatively low compared to previous decades, gun violence is way up. The National Rifle Association might tell you that more guns make us more safe, but life doesn't actually work that way.

The extremes on both sides of this issue are misguided. We would almost certainly be safer with more and better-trained police as well as fewer and better-tracked guns. Still, the plain fact is that we don't yet know for sure why the rates of the worst violent crimes went up over the past year or so.

What we do know — and what someone should tell Trump whenever he opens his mouth to exacerbate racial polarization — is that the sharp increase began in 2020. Yes, that was during his presidency. So, you could write a headline blaring: "Homicide Rates Increased 53 Percent in Major Cities Between 2019 and 2020," and that would be true, too.

Would that claim prove anything? Not really. Except that on issues of public policy, the former guy and his little partisan echoes should pipe down.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Calif. GOP Gubernatorial Hopeful Spends Week On Fresno Streets

Calif. GOP Gubernatorial Hopeful Spends Week On Fresno Streets

By John Ellis, The Fresno Bee

FRESNO, Calif. — On July 21, Republican gubernatorial hopeful Neel Kashkari stepped off a bus in downtown Fresno with $40 in his pocket and planned to spend the next week job hunting while living on the streets.

His campaign project went public Thursday, with a professional video of his Fresno experience posted on his website and a commentary published in The Wall Street Journal.

The 10-minute YouTube video shows Kashkari sleeping on a bench in Courthouse Park and on some bricks in Civic Center Square. It shows the multi-millionaire being rousted by security officials while sleeping in a parking garage.

All the while, he walks around downtown — past Club One Casino and the “Welcome to the Mural District” sign — asking about work and finding none.

“I came to Fresno expecting to find a job and take care of myself,” Kashkari says in the video. “It’s been a week and I’ve found nothing. I’ve run out of money and had to turn to the homeless shelter for food.”

The point, Kashkari said in an interview with The Fresno Bee Thursday, was to show that the economic recovery touted by Gov. Jerry Brown has not reached many parts of the state. Fresno, he said, best illustrated his point. It’s the kind of publicity that Fresno leaders would rather not have.

Asked if Kashkari should have chosen another city for his project, Al Smith, who runs the Greater Fresno Area Chamber of Commerce, said “I wish he would have. We don’t need any help from him in that department.”

Like Kashkari, Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin also is running for statewide office. Swearengin has been running her controller campaign against Democrat Betty Yee on a platform of turning Fresno around and leading it out of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

“A little bit of a mixed message, isn’t it?” said Tom Holyoke, a Fresno State political science professor.

But, he added, “when you desperately need (media) attention, you do these sort of things.”

Polls show Kashkari well behind Brown in both fundraising and in voter support. The video, some political experts said, got Kashkari more media attention than a week’s worth of paid television commercials in all of California’s major media markets.

Kashkari said his campaign has “talked about poverty since day one,” an a month ago the idea was hatched to have him spend some time as a homeless job hunter as a way to highlight both homelessness and joblessness.

The rule would be $40 and no more, not even a credit card, Kashkari said.

But why Fresno?

“The Central Valley gets overlooked a lot by politicians,” he said. “We wanted to go somewhere in the Central Valley. Fresno has the highest unemployment rate of any big city in California.”

He said it also has been hit hard by the state’s drought.

So he boarded a bus in Los Angeles — a city with its own homeless challenges — and rode north to Fresno. At the end of a week, he was still jobless and found himself having to eat and shower at the Poverello House.

There are certainly jobs to be had in Fresno. The Fresno Bee‘s online classified ad postings and Craigslist together featured more than 100 job possibilities on Thursday. In some parts of Fresno outside downtown, help wanted signs are up.

But Kashkari had no resume. He only once ventured more than a short walk away from the heart of downtown. Instead, he mostly popped into stores unannounced, saying he was new in town and asking for work.

“Hey, I just got into town and I’m looking for work,” he says at one point in the video. “Are you guys hiring? Is anyone around here hiring at all?”

And with only one shower the entire week, he probably didn’t smell too good after a few days.

Kashkari also clearly had a point to make with the video, which focused on the city’s most desperate residents and featured scenes such as food handout lines, rundown homes, and the burned out old Del Monte packing house in Chinatown.

There were no shots of River Park, the Palm Bluffs Corporate Center or homes along the Fort Washington County Club or on the bluffs overlooking the San Joaquin River.

“The solution is simple,” a stubble-faced Kashkari, standing on a downtown Fresno street corner, says toward the end of the video. “It’s jobs. It’s not more welfare. It’s not more food stamps. It’s jobs, and we know how to do this. These problems are of our own making. That means they’re within our capacity to solve.”

His solutions: reign in regulations, which will allow businesses to grow and hire more people. Invest in water infrastructure, which will help farmers who in turn will hire more workers
.
It didn’t take long for Fresno County Democratic Party Chair Michael Evans to send out a lengthy written response to the video.

“Let me be clear, the problems Mr. Kashkari outlines here in Fresno are real; however, his ‘solutions’ to those problems are either completely lacking or based on long-discredited trickle-down economic theory that Republicans since the age of Reagan have been pushing,” he wrote.

He pointed out that Kashkari opposes the state’s proposed high-speed rail project, which would start construction in Fresno and “offer much-needed construction jobs and connect the region to our state’s prosperous job hubs like the Bay Area and Southern California.”

Evans mocks Kashkari for concluding that food stamps, welfare, and a higher minimum wage are not the answer.

“That’s an easy thing for a millionaire to say,” Evans wrote.

Photo via WikiCommons

Interested in U.S. politics? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Fresno ranks No. 1 on California pollution list

Fresno ranks No. 1 on California pollution list

By Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times

FRESNO, Calif. — California’s new effort to map the areas most at risk from pollution features hot spots up and down California.

But nowhere are there more of the worst-afflicted areas than in Fresno — in particular a 3,000-person tract of the city’s west side where diesel exhaust, tainted water, pesticides and poverty conspire to make it No. 1 on California’s toxic hit list.

“I’m looking at this map, and all I see is red. We’re right here,” Daisy Perez, a social worker at the Cecil C. Hinton Community Center, said as she located the center of the red areas that represented the top 10 percent most-polluted census tracts in California. “It’s so sad. Good people live here.”

Pollution has long plagued the Central Valley, where agriculture, topography and poverty have thwarted efforts to clean the air and water. The maps released this week by the California Environmental Protection Agency show that eight of the state’s 10 census tracts most heavily burdened by pollution are in Fresno.

For residents of the state’s worst-scoring area, statistics tell only part of the story of what it is like to live there.

It’s a place where agriculture meets industry, crisscrossed by freeways. The city placed its dumps and meat-rendering plants there decades ago.

Historically, it was the heart of the city’s African-American community. The Central Valley’s civil rights movement was centered in its churches. People referred to it as West Fresno, which meant a culture as well as a place.

These days, young community workers call it by its ZIP Code — the “93706 Zone.”

It’s home to a Latino community — the children and grandchildren of migrant workers; to Hmong and Cambodian farmers; and to a minority African-American community that includes those desperate to leave, and an old guard of those who say they will never abandon home.

“The voice of the community is still black. Because we’re the ones who now have the wherewithal and time to speak,” said Jim Aldredge, who took over running the community center when the city cut its budget. “Look, when you’re just trying to survive, you don’t have time to go before City Council and all that. Pollution data is the farthest thing from your mind when you’re looking for your next meal.”

Aldredge grew up in West Fresno and worked in city government for 20 years, once as city manager. He can point out better than most the stories literally buried beneath the landscape.

There’s the grassy hill — just a mound, really — that constitutes Hyde Park, which was once a dump. Not a landfill, but an old-time dump where people took trash and tires to be burned.

The city is careful to keep the grass green on top of the mound, and a study done before building started on the new junior high school found the land no longer contaminated by chemicals that had seeped into the ground.

Across the street is an animal rendering plant, a chicken plant and an electric substation.

In front of the plants are fields of strawberries, giving way to orchards of pistachio and fruit trees.

This area ranks in the 90th percentile for pesticide applications, according to the state.

“But we don’t talk about the pesticides,” Aldredge said. “The agricultural folks are so strong.”

On Tuesday, a bright blue day, a breeze kicked up dust devils in a wide open field of dirt across the street from a housing tract.

This was where Donald Trump once planned to build a golf course designed by Jack Nicholson, surrounded by country club homes. Now it is dust. Fine particulate matter is one of the leading causes of air pollution in Fresno during the winter months.

The most controversial industry in the area is the Darling International meat processing plant.

A vocal group of residents led by Mary Curry, who lives downwind from the stench, maintains a strong public outcry.

According to the Cal/EPA data, the nearby Cargill rendering plant actually releases more pollutants into the air than the Darling plant.

But there is no organized push against that plant, which sits near the intersection of two freeways in the census tract, known as Edison, with the most health risks in all of California.

The new data — the first of its kind in the country — looks at a community’s level of education and ability to communicate with the power structure as well as environmental factors.

When Aldredge was a teenager — a standout baseball player intent on leaving West Fresno behind — he would walk by tallow plants with dead horses and cows outside and a slaughterhouse that always smelled.

“I don’t know that I even knew different,” he said. “It was just the way things were.”

On Tuesdays, when the community center gives out food, part of Daisy Perez’s work is to ask residents what they like about their neighborhood and what bothers them.

“They always say that they like that it’s quiet. People like the country feel and the community feel,” she said. “But they always complain about headaches, especially when the wind blows. They think it’s the smell from the meat plants or maybe the pesticides.”

A breeze carried a smell from a meat rendering plant. Perez said she found it a choking stench and had to fight a gag reflex.

Shakur Tyson, 14, who goes to school and works at the center, said at first he didn’t smell anything.

Then he said he was starting to notice a bit of a smell.

“I’m just used to it. I guess,” he said. “It’s the way things are.”

Flickr via Agustín Ruiz

California’s San Joaquin River Is Most Endangered In U.S., Group Says

California’s San Joaquin River Is Most Endangered In U.S., Group Says

By Mark Grossi, The Fresno Bee

FRESNO, California — The San Joaquin River in California is America’s most endangered waterway this year, says the national advocacy group American Rivers, known for annually picking the country’s 10 most troubled rivers.

The San Joaquin’s water is spread too thin among farmers, hydroelectric projects and other uses on the main stem and three tributaries, the Merced, Stanislaus and Tuolumne rivers, the group announced Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

For decades, the San Joaquin has been periodically dry for more than 60 miles northwest of Fresno, destroying salmon runs and parts of the river channel. A restoration project began nearly five years ago to reconnect the river with the Pacific Ocean and rebuild salmon runs.

But authorities must continue the fight to get past this dry year, said John Cain of American Rivers.

“The San Joaquin is at a tipping point,” he said. “We need to maintain water releases from the tributaries for fish and water quality and continue the restoration project.”

He added that it is the first time the section near Fresno has been the most endangered on the list. The section was among the 10 most endangered rivers named in 1997. The lower section at the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has twice been on the list with the Sacramento River.

The American Rivers list has no official clout, but it has been widely followed for more than 25 years. Last year, the Colorado River was the most endangered.

Cain noted the San Joaquin River restoration is getting no water in this epic drought year, the same as many area farmers. He said American Rivers supports help for farmers in this natural disaster, but the group does not want environmental laws set aside.

East San Joaquin Valley farmers, who use the river for irrigation, fought the restoration for 18 years before agreeing to give up some water for the project, which remains a sore spot for them.

People and agriculture in central California continue to need the river as much as nature, said Merced County farmer Kole Upton.

“What about all the communities that are supported by the river?” he asked. “What about all the people who work at providing food for the country?”

More than 60 miles of the river dried up and salmon runs died after the Friant Dam was built in the 1940s. For decades, the river’s water nurtured farming and communities, such as Orange Cove.

Legal watchdog Natural Resources Defense Council filed the 1988 lawsuit that led to the restoration project. Senior NRDC scientist Monty Schmitt said the most endangered ranking highlights changes coming for San Joaquin restoration.

“We’re moving from planning to implementation phases now,” he said. “We’ve been able to adapt to this dry year by studying juvenile salmon in the river. I hope we never face another year like this, but we will know how the river reacts next time.”

In Fresno, a leader of the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust said he saw the endangered river ranking as a wake-up call. The parkway trust is helping to preserve land along the river for a 22-mile greenbelt from Friant Dam to Highway 99.

“This ranking is not something you want,” said parkway trust executive director Dave Koehler. “But we need to build ecological health back into the river. Ecological health is as important to people as it is to fish.”

Photo: eutrophication&hypoxia via Flickr