police violence research paper

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• NEWS FEATURE
• 19 June 2020
• Update 26 May 2021

What the data say about police brutality and racial bias — and which reforms might work

• Lynne Peeples 0

Lynne Peeples is a science journalist in Seattle, Washington.

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For 9 minutes and 29 seconds, Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into the neck of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. This deadly use of force by the now-former Minneapolis police officer has reinvigorated a very public debate about police brutality and racism.

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Nature 583 , 22-24 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01846-z

Updates & Corrections

Update 26 May 2021 : On 20 April 2021, Derek Chauvin was convicted of causing the death of George Floyd. The text has been modified to include updated information on how long Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.

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• v.110(11); Nov 2020

Impact of Police Violence on Mental Health: A Theoretical Framework

J. DeVylder wrote the original draft of the article. L. Fedina and B. Link contributed substantially to the editing and revision of subsequent drafts of the article. All authors participated in the conceptual development and final editing of the article.

Police violence has increasingly been recognized as a public health concern in the United States, and accumulating evidence has shown police violence exposure to be linked to a broad range of health and mental health outcomes. These associations appear to extend beyond the typical associations between violence and mental health, and to be independent of the effects of co-occurring forms of trauma and violence exposure. However, there is no existing theoretical framework within which we may understand the unique contributions of police violence to mental health and illness.

This article aims to identify potential factors that may distinguish police violence from other forms of violence and trauma exposure, and to explore the possibility that this unique combination of factors distinguishes police violence from related risk exposures. We identify 8 factors that may alter this relationship, including those that increase the likelihood of overall exposure, increase the psychological impact of police violence, and impede the possibility of coping or recovery from such exposures.

On the basis of these factors, we propose a theoretical framework for the further study of police violence from a public mental health perspective.

A new public narrative around the prevalence and effects of police violence has emerged over the past several years in the United States, accompanied recently by a dramatic shift in public opinion following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain, and the related national civil uprising and protests. Although Black, Latinx, Native American, and sexual and gender minority communities have long perceived a culture of inequitable treatment, it is only with the widespread adaptation of smartphone technology and real-time dissemination of footage through social media that this has become part of the national consciousness. 1 Media attention has primarily focused on individual incidents of police killings rather than on broader population-level health effects and implications. Although death is certainly the most severe health outcome, it is just as certainly not the most common. The mental health effects of police violence may be less visible yet much more pervasive and, potentially, more impactful when considered across an entire community or population.

In this article, we place the emerging literature on the mental health correlates of police violence within the broader context of research on violence, and explore whether the “police” in “police violence” bestows a specific meaning that extends beyond violence itself—is police violence a form of violence just like any other? By describing potential factors that may distinguish police violence from other forms of violence and trauma exposure—either as factors that are unique to police violence or that vary in degree between police violence and other forms of violence—we propose a theoretical framework for the further study of police violence from a public mental health perspective.

RELEVANCE OF POLICE VIOLENCE TO MENTAL HEALTH

Stress has pervasive effects on one’s psychological well-being, straining one’s sense of role or purpose and affecting concepts of self-esteem and mastery, which contributes in turn to mental health difficulties. 2 Although there is not a single unifying theory linking stressful or traumatic social exposures to mental health symptoms, these factors play a prominent etiological role in leading theories on a broad range of disparate mental health conditions, such as the social signal transduction theory of depression 3 or the social defeat theory of psychosis. 4 Although the often-siloed research of each psychological outcome has led to uniquely labeled theories, these theories all point to a pathway in which trauma spurs biological or psychological changes that manifest over time as psychiatric symptoms, particularly when the trauma is sexually or physically violent. 5 Further, although theoretical work on stressful life events has attempted to provide a broader framework for how stress may translate to psychopathology, focusing particularly on the role of uncontrollable stressful events that affect one’s usual activities, goals, and values, this framework has not been directly applied toward understanding police violence. 6

We therefore explore the construct of police violence as a potential etiological factor for mental health conditions, based on the assumptions that (1) violence and trauma are associated with elevated risk for a broad range of mental health symptoms and (2) the contribution to risk may vary not only by severity of exposure, but also by type of exposure. Specifically, we explore whether police violence possesses a unique pattern of characteristics and mechanisms that distinguish it from other forms of violence exposure in its association with mental health symptoms.

For the purposes of this article, we refer generally to “police violence” and “mental health” because there is not yet sufficient research to confidently link specific subtypes of police violence to specific mental health outcomes. We therefore define police violence as acute events of physical, sexual, psychological, or neglectful violence, following the World Health Organization’s guidelines on defining violence and earlier work on the phenomenology of police violence exposure. 7 Mental health is intended to be inclusive of behaviors and psychological symptoms that would be considered indicators of clinical psychopathology, including but not limited to general psychological distress, posttraumatic stress symptoms, suicidal ideation and behavior, psychosis-like experiences, and depression. These definitions may need to be expanded as this literature develops, as currently it typically focuses on acute violent events (rather than chronic or vicarious exposures) and a psychopathology-oriented view of mental health (rather than a focus on functioning or quality of life), but they are being used here as a reflection of the variables typically employed in the literature at this point in time.

MENTAL HEALTH CORRELATES OF POLICE VIOLENCE

Recent public attention directed toward police violence has spurred an emerging literature on the health significance of police violence exposure, 1,8,9 addressing a long-unheeded call to conceptualize police violence as a public health issue in the United States. 7 Cross-sectional studies have consistently found clinically and statistically significant associations between police violence exposure and a range of mental health outcomes, 10-16 and community-level data have likewise demonstrated higher rates of mental health symptoms in neighborhoods or cities in which police abuse (e.g., “stop and frisk” practices, which are primarily used in neighborhoods predominantly composed of people of color) and killings of unarmed civilians are more common. 17,18 These associations have generally been found to remain statistically significant (and of sufficient effect sizes to support public health significance) even with adjustment for closely related forms of violence exposure, such as interpersonal violence or lifetime abuse exposure. 10,14 For example, exposure to assaultive forms of police violence (i.e., physical or sexual) has been found to be associated with 4- to 11-fold greater odds for a suicide attempt among adults across racial/ethnic groups, even with conservative adjustments. 12,14 Although most of this research has been conducted with adults, recent analyses suggest that this problem extends into adolescence as well. 19 A selective overview of recent work on this topic is provided in Table 1 , and has recently been reviewed elsewhere. 21

TABLE 1—

Selective Overview of Recent Studies of Police Violence and Mental Health: United States

Note. DSM-IV  =  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association; 1994); PTSD = posttraumatic stress disorder.

WHY IS POLICE VIOLENCE DIFFERENT?

Overall, accumulated evidence consistently identifies moderate to strong associations between self-reported exposure to police violence and measures of mental health. Additionally, some evidence indicates that these effects operate independently of exposure to other forms of violence. It was this accumulation of evidence that led us to ask whether and to what extent police violence has unique features that lead it to be so impactful for mental health outcomes. Here, we propose 8 factors that may distinguish police violence from other forms of violence, some of which are unique to police violence and others that may vary by degree. Given the complexity of the issue, we see our conceptualization as a step toward a more complete understanding of this important issue, recognizing that it will need further development in the time ahead.

Police Violence Is State Sanctioned

A long tradition in social science theory suggests that the police play a critical role in disciplining the public, not just in terms of offenses and punishments but in the construction and maintenance of an established social order favoring dominant groups. In light of the use of the police in this regard, it follows that exposure to violence emanating from their actions would have distinct and pernicious features. 22,23 Police organizations in the United States are thus authoritative institutions legitimized to apply force—and potentially fatal force—to maintain a particular social and political order. 24 In interactions with civilians, police officers are in positions of relatively greater power because of both the symbolic and state-sanctioned status of their profession, and their immediate legal availability of means (e.g., guns, batons, tasers) to wield force, threat of force, and coercion, at their discretion. This distinguishes police violence from interpersonal forms of violence that are perpetrated by people who are not sanctioned to enact violence, such as caregivers, peers, or intimate partners.

This distinction is made not to downplay the seriousness of other forms of violence—such as child abuse, intimate partner violence, or sexual assault—but to assert that modern-day police violence is embedded in historical state-enforced practices that permitted cruel, unusual, and dehumanizing punishment of individuals deemed to be from threatening or “dangerous classes,” 25 particularly Blacks. Communities of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities have been historically subjected to racially motivated, discriminatory state-sponsored laws (e.g., Jim Crow laws, sodomy laws) enforced by police that permitted harassment, discrimination, and excessive and fatal force against individuals from these communities. As such, the processes and contexts in which police violence has been historically perpetuated are uniquely distinct from the perpetuation of interpersonal forms of violence by others. Furthermore, police violence is sanctioned not only by institutions in the United States but also by the American public, and is intentionally designed to uphold White supremacy. 26 Members of the dominant society thus contribute to police violence and the lack of police accountability.

The Police Are a Pervasive Presence

A core characteristic of many people’s reaction to violence is avoidance of reminders and triggers—especially of the perpetrators themselves. This common and adaptive response to a harmful situation is not available to people who have been exposed to police violence. It is simply not possible to avoid a system that inflicts racially motivated violence while staying within the country, even if one manages to avoid the specific offending officer, and the stress of this police avoidance has been shown to be directly related to severity of depressive symptoms among adult Black men. 20 Much in the same way that police violence by one officer generalizes to fear of all officers even if most officers do not perpetrate violence, intimate partner violence often generalizes to fear of all romantic partners, particularly of a given gender. However, this process may be exacerbated for victims of police violence and is in some ways different from what transpires when people are exposed to other forms of violence. For example, although victims of intimate partner violence and sexual assault who seek help and legal recourse face enormous barriers and challenges, the US justice system can separate victims from perpetrators through legal protection or restraining orders or through incarceration of the perpetrator. In the case of police violence, the presence of law enforcement in the US context is pervasive, and victims have few or no options to seek help and legal recourse, or to entirely avoid police officers in public places.

There Are Limited Options for Recourse

Victims of police violence have little legal recourse or opportunities for seeking help in the criminal justice system. The police have legal sanction to intervene in other crimes of violence (e.g., sexual assault, physical assault), making it much more difficult to prove that the violence was unjustly or excessively delivered. Additionally, the people reviewing disputed cases are often also police officers, and indicted police officers are tried by prosecutors who must otherwise work with police officers. These and other circumstances make contesting the perpetration of violence extremely difficult. Victims of other forms of violence, particularly intimate partner violence, indeed face enormous barriers in seeking help and legal recourse, including stigma in reporting intimate partner violence, poverty and other economic barriers, and other sociocultural and contextual factors. 27 Victims of police violence face many of these same barriers; because they have few if any options for reporting an incident, for legal recourse, or for advocacy services and referrals to mental health treatment, any mental health symptoms they have may worsen over time. 28

Police Culture Deters Internal Accountability

Police violence occurs within a larger, institutional context that is shaped by the organization’s culture. An organizational culture that upholds a “code of silence” surrounding police officers’ abusive behaviors toward civilians allows for the perpetuation of police abuse of power and can prevent police officers, particularly those from lower ranks, from reporting such abuses to their superiors. 29

Given that violence perpetuated through institutions (rather than interpersonal relationships) is supported by an organizational culture condoning harmful behaviors (e.g., harassment, coercion, psychological abuse, physical assault), particularly against those from historically marginalized and disadvantaged communities, experiencing abuse at the hands of police officers who wield such power and authority over civilians may lead to exacerbated mental health consequences. Past research suggests that exposure to sexual assault while serving in the military is associated with psychiatric disorders above and beyond symptoms associated with civilian sexual assault. 30 This suggests that contextual factors related to violence, particularly contexts defined by substantial power and authoritative differentials, may influence associations with mental health symptoms.

Police Violence Alters Deeply Held Beliefs

People feel more secure if they feel safe and protected in their day-to-day activities. Assumptive World Theory proposes that people’s deeply held beliefs about the world and themselves can be shaken by an event that forcefully disconfirms such beliefs. 31 Police violence is particularly likely to provide such disconfirming evidence in that the police represent a societal institution that many, though not all, have come to rely on deeply and implicitly for help when a threat emerges. When police perpetrate violence, this belief is shattered as the police are no longer protectors but rather the central threat that needs to be addressed. Additionally, police violence is normative, rather than an acute or singular event, which has led to the erosion of public trust in the police and favorable views of police seen as protective.

Theories of police legitimacy, which refers to the public’s perceptions and views of police as a legitimate authority that is trustworthy and upholds public safety, propose that legitimacy is in part formed through individual police–citizen interactions. 32 As such, it is plausible that individual and group experiences with police violence influence individual views and beliefs that police are not trustworthy sources of protection and safety. Of course, this sundering of assumptions occurs with other types of violence, such as when a believed-to-be-loving spouse hits a partner or a thought-to-be-protective parent engages in child abuse. However, the police have been described as a “last resort” for people when other remedies have been tried and failed. 33 A spouse might call the police as a last resort when other efforts to stop an abusive partner have failed, or a neighbor might make such a call if polite efforts to address enduring abuse of a child have failed. But to the extent that exposure to police violence intrudes, the “last resort” is gone and one may feel stuck in a brutal and frightening world with no recourse.

Racial and Economic Disparities in Exposure

Because police violence is disproportionately directed toward people of color, many of whom are poor, it can underscore a sense of diminished value within the US racial and class hierarchies. Accordingly, the media narrative around police violence has focused on incidents directed toward Black people, and has at times framed these incidents within the context of the legacy of racism and White supremacy in the United States. Data from the first and second Survey of Police–Public Encounters studies have confirmed that—at least in Baltimore, Maryland; New York City; the District of Columbia; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—police violence is more likely to be directed toward people of color, although it is notable that these studies have found Latinx groups to be at approximately the same level of risk as non-Latinx Blacks. 11,14 Although White respondents were also at some risk of exposure to police violence, the racial disparities were significant, even after adjustment for crime involvement and income. Similarly, the prevalence of police-inflicted shootings is approximately 3.5-fold greater among non-Latinx Black than non-Latinx White residents of the United States. 34 Perceptions of racism have been shown to magnify, and perhaps even overshadow, the effects of violent acts. 35 Given that police violence is perceived to be racially motivated in many cases, 34 it is likely that these same effects carry over to many victims of this form of violence.

Notably, there is insufficient prior data to allow a thorough discussion of police violence and mental health among indigenous populations, although the rate of police killings is extremely high among this group. Other potentially high-risk groups likely include people who identify as sexual or gender minorities, people who are homeless, or those who have a severe mental illness diagnosis, among others. Future research should focus on understudied sociodemographic groups that are disproportionately subject to police violence (e.g., indigenous populations, trans individuals), and the conceptual framework presented in this article will require modification as more data become available.

Police Violence Is Stigmatizing

Victims of violent incidents, such as intimate partner violence and community violence, often seek informal support from friends, family, and other social contacts, which has been shown to have a beneficial impact on mental health. 36 However, exposure to police violence carries the potential of inducing harmful stigma. Although stigma may be mitigated in some circumstances in which people distrust the police, a person may nonetheless face judgments from dominant groups who carry the power to discriminate in critical life domains such as educational opportunities, jobs, and housing. This stigma may in turn limit help-seeking behaviors if mental health problems emerge and if there is a perception that treatment providers may not be able to sufficiently understand the circumstances that led to the mental health problems. 37

The police are highly respected in some US communities, sometimes to the point of exaltation, and are supported by a labor union of more than 100 000 workers as well as significant and well-funded public image and advocacy groups such as Blue Lives Matter (which arose as a countermovement to Black Lives Matter and consequently contributes to rather than alleviates concerns of racism and lack of accountability around police violence). As such, there may be substantial stigma around reporting incidents of police violence to family members, friends, and acquaintances, some of whom may have some personal or ideological connection to the police force. Further, when there are major social movements or protests following prominent incidents of police violence, many in the public, particularly those who benefit from the dominant social order that the police help to maintain, take a “blaming the victim” mentality and highlight infractions by the victim that may have justified their injury or death (e.g., the alleged theft of cigarillos by Michael Brown cited as justification for excessive and fatal force). On a broader societal level, protests in Ferguson, Missouri were blamed for a subsequent supposed “war on cops” in which the rate of civilians killing police officers purportedly increased, although there is no actual evidence for any such increase. 38

Police Are Typically Armed

Unlike front-line police officers in some other countries, police officers patrolling neighborhoods in the United States are typically armed, which makes civilians’ interactions with the police potentially more threatening. As a result of several landmark Supreme Court decisions, police officers in the United States have a great deal of legal latitude in determining when to use force, and even fatal force. Additionally, the militarization of police in the United States, largely as a result of “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror” policies, has equipped police departments with firearms and military-grade equipment and expanded their capacity to use force if officers believe their lives or the lives of others are in danger. 39 Thus, the perceived threat of police victimization in civilians’ interactions with police may lead to unique mental health implications for communities most affected by police violence. Further, in addition to the threat of immediate violence through the use of weapons, police encounters also can lead to a more sustained form of exposure to violence and coercion through imprisonment. This threat may be compounded in geographical (e.g., low-income urban areas) and demographic communities (e.g., Black, Latinx, and Native American) with high rates of incarceration.

PROPOSED CONCEPTUAL MODEL

Figure A (available as a supplement to the online version of this article at http://www.ajph.org ) portrays a conceptual model illustrating points at which the influence of police violence on mental health may be different from processes that produce associations between other types of violence exposure and mental health. Specifically, we highlight the 8 potentially influential factors that were described in the previous section, which provides a valuable starting point from which the construct of police violence can be further explored from a public health standpoint. The assumption that police violence is violence like any other would require that the net effect of all of these 8 factors would sum to zero (i.e., have no total effect on mental health). This assumption is highly unlikely, particularly since some of these pathways are now supported by epidemiological evidence (e.g., stress of police avoidance has been recently linked to depressive symptoms). 20 Many (but not all) of these features are present in other forms of violence, although the unique intersection of these features may make police violence a specific type of violence and one worthy of study as a separate construct, similar to the intersection of common and specific elements as determinants of the health impact of other life events. 6 In fact, the literature on stressful life events may provide a useful framework for determining the potential mental health salience of these various features of police violence. Table 2 outlines the primary dimensions of stressful life events based on work by Dohrenwend, 6 a widely used framework for understanding and interpreting the relationship between uncontrollable stressors and mental health outcomes, and it applies these dimensions to our model of police violence.

TABLE 2—

Police Violence Within the Life Events Dimensions Proposed by Dohrenwend

Source. Dohrenwend. 6

To provide a preliminary framework for subsequent work, we have also developed a more complex hypothetical model that illustrates potential mechanisms through which the discussed factors may influence the pathways from police violence to mental health (Figure B, available as a supplement to the online version of this article at http://www.ajph.org ). Although it is speculative because of the limited prior empirical research, we are proposing this model to provide potential conceptual pathways that can be tested in future research. Specifically, 4 of the factors (i.e., access to a weapon, state-sanctioned violence, perceived racial and class biases, and risk of incarceration) are likely to increase the immediate impact of violent incidents and therefore may have the most direct effects on mental health, as they are characteristics of the acute incident itself. Three of the factors (i.e., pervasive presence, lack of recourse, and stigma of reporting police violence) pertain more to the time following an exposure to violence, and therefore may have an effect on mental health by impeding coping and recovery. Finally, police culture, in combination with the proliferation of firearms in the US general population and the American legacy of racism, 24 may have an impact on the overall likelihood or prevalence of police violence. 40 Future studies can confirm whether these pathways provide a feasible explanation for the link between police violence and mental health. It is our intention that this preliminary framework may be modified and updated as research evidence accumulates that may confirm or disconfirm these proposed pathways.

CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS

In this article, we aimed to determine whether it is reasonable to consider police violence exposure to be a unique risk factor for mental distress, independent and conceptually separable from other forms of violence, or whether such a distinction is unjustified and insufficiently parsimonious. We highlighted several features of police violence that may conceptually distinguish it from other forms of violence. For police violence to be considered effectively similar to other forms of violence exposure, regarding its impact on health, the net effect of these distinguishing features would need to sum to zero, or at least have a clinically insignificant effect. Albeit speculatively, we are confident in stating that this seems highly unlikely. There is now substantial and growing evidence that police violence exposure is associated with a broad range of mental health outcomes, independent of other forms of violence and stress exposure. To test the proposed model, subsequent studies will need to examine the mechanisms underlying this risk and map those mechanisms onto these proposed features of police violence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Leslie Salas-Hernández for contributing to the selective overview of recent studies on the mental health implications of police violence.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

HUMAN PARTICIPANT PROTECTION

Institutional approval was not required for this conceptual article, which did not directly involve human participants.

See also Alang, p. 1597 .

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Justin M. Feldman, ScD

Roland Fryer is wrong: There is racial bias in shootings by police

2020 update: The specific flaws of Roland Fryer's paper have now been characterized in two studies (by other scholars, not myself). Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2019) reanalyze Fryer's data to find it understates racial biases. Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath (2018) do something similar through a statistical simulation.

Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard University, recently published a working paper at NBER on the topic of racial bias in police use of force and police shootings. The paper gained substantial media attention – a write-up of it became the top viewed  article on the New York Times website. The most notable part of the study was its finding that there was no evidence of racial bias in police shootings, which Fryer called “the most surprising result of [his] career”. In his analysis of shootings in Houston, Texas, black and Hispanic people were no more likely (and perhaps even less likely) to be shot relative to whites.

Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed, however. It suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors, and he has communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading. While there have long been problems with the quality of police shootings data, there is still plenty of evidence to support a pattern of systematic, racially discriminatory use of force against black people in the United States.

Breaking down the analysis of police shootings in Houston

There should be no argument that black and Latino people in Houston are much more likely to be shot by police compared to whites. I looked at the same Houston police shooting dataset as Fryer for the years 2005-2015, which I supplemented with census data, and found that black people were over 5 times as likely to be shot relative to whites. Latinos were roughly twice as likely to be shot versus whites.

Fryer was not comparing rates of police shootings by race, however. Instead, his research asked whether these racial differences were the result of “racial bias” rather than merely “statistical discrimination”. Both terms have specific meanings in economics. Statistical discrimination occurs when an individual or institution treats people differently based on racial stereotypes that ‘truly’ reflect the average behavior of a racial group. For instance, if a city’s black drivers are 50% more likely to possess drugs than white drivers, and police officers are 50% more likely to pull over black drivers, economic theory would hold that this discriminatory policing is rational. If, however, police were to pull over black drivers at a rate that disproportionately exceeded their likelihood of drug possession, that would be an irrational behavior representing individual or institutional bias.

Once explained, it is possible to find the idea of “statistical discrimination” just as abhorrent as “racial bias”. One could point out that the drug laws police enforce were passed with racially discriminatory intent, that collectively punishing black people based on “average behavior” is wrong, or that – as a self-fulfilling prophecy – bias can turn into statistical discrimination (if black people’s cars are searched more thoroughly, for instance, it will appear that their rates of drug possession are higher). At the same time, studies assessing the extent of racial bias above and beyond statistical discrimination have been able to secure legal victories for civil rights. An analysis of stop-and-frisk data by Jeffrey Fagan , which found evidence racial bias, was an important part of the court case against the NYPD, and helped secure an injunction against the policy.

Even if one accepts the logic of statistical discrimination versus racial bias, it is an inappropriate choice for a study of police shootings. The method that Fryer employs has, for the most part, been used to study traffic stops and stop-and-frisk practices. In those cases, economic theory holds that police want to maximize the number of arrests for the possession of contraband (such as drugs or weapons) while expending the fewest resources. If they are acting in the most cost-efficient, rational manner, the officers may use racial stereotypes to increase the arrest rate per stop. This theory completely falls apart for police shootings, however, because officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings. The theory that is supposed to be informing Fryer's choice of methods is therefore not applicable to this case. He seems somewhat aware of this issue. In his interview with the New York Times, he attributes his ‘surprising’ finding to an issue of “costs, legal and psychological” that happen following a shooting. In what is perhaps a case of cognitive dissonance, he seems to not have reflected on whether the question of cost renders his choice of methods invalid.

Economic theory aside, there is an even more fundamental problem with the Houston police shooting analysis. In a typical study, a researcher will start with a previously defined population where each individual is at risk of a particular outcome. For instance, a population of drivers stopped by police can have one of two outcomes: they can be arrested, or they can be sent on their way. Instead of following this standard approach, Fryer constructs a fictitious population of people who are shot by police and people who are arrested. The problem here is that these two groups (those shot and those arrested) are, in all likelihood, systematically different from one another in ways that cannot be controlled for statistically (UPenn Professor Uri Simonsohn expands on this point here ). Fryer acknowledges this limitation in a brief footnote, but understates just how problematic it is. Properly interpreted, the actual result from Fryer’s analysis is that the racial disparity in arrest rates is larger than the racial disparity in police shootings. This is an unsurprising finding, and proves neither a lack of bias nor a lack of systematic discrimination.

Even if the difference in the arrest vs. shooting groups could be accounted for, Fryer tries to control for these differences using variables in police reports, such as if the suspect was described as 'violently resisting arrest'. There is reason to believe that these police reports themselves are racially biased. An investigation of people charged with assaulting a police officer in Washington, DC found that this charge was applied disproportionately towards black residents even for situations in which no assault actually occurred. This was partly due to an overly broad definition of assault against police in DC law, but the principle - that police are likely to describe black civilians as more threatening - is applicable to other jurisdictions.

I’ll also briefly note that there was another analysis, using data from multiple cities, that looked at racial differences in whether or not civilians attacked officers before they were shot. Fryer himself downplays the credibility of this analysis, because it relied on reports from police who had every incentive to misrepresent the order of events.

Racial inequality in police shootings

Fryer’s study is far from the first to investigate racial bias or discrimination in police shootings. A number of studies have placed officers in shooting simulators, and  most have shown a greater propensity for shooting black civilians relative to whites. Other research has found that cities with black mayors and city councilors have lower rates of police shootings than would otherwise be expected. A recent analysis of national data showed wide variation in racial disparities for police shooting rates between counties, and these differences were not associated with racial differences in crime rates. This is just a small sample of the dozens of studies on police killings published since the 1950s, most of which suggests that racial bias is indeed a problem.

It is a failure of journalism that the New York Times heavily promoted this study without seeking critical perspectives from experts in the field. Fryer makes basic methodological errors, overstates the quality of his results, and casually uses the term “racial bias” in a way that is nearly guaranteed to be misinterpreted by anyone who isn’t an economist.

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Research Points to Downside of Police Response to Intimate Partner Violence

Policing of intimate partner violence (IPV) may result in adverse consequences for survivors, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The evidence concerning the generalized consequences of IPV policing has not been comprehensively evaluated until now, and the results call into question whether IPV policing benefits survivors.

A new study is the first to review the consequences of IPV policing in the U.S. The findings are published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior.

IPV, which includes physical violence, sexual violence, psychological abuse, and other forms of coercion between current or former spouses or dating partners, impacts more than 40 percent of people in the U.S. The U.S. has long maintained a police-centric response to IPV despite increased recognition of the harms of mass criminalization and incarceration and growing calls for criminal legal reform. 

Research on the effectiveness of IPV policing has primarily been limited to studies on the effect of arrest on individual revictimization. Despite about three decades of research on this topic, there is mixed evidence that arrest reduces subsequent victimization. Moreover, little attention has been paid to other generalized consequences of IPV policing, such as police violence against survivors, reduced help-seeking, survivor arrest, or child protective services involvement. The authors aimed to synthesize evidence on such generalized consequences and assess whether studies considered differential effects by race.

The authors searched Web of Science, ProQuest, and EBSCO Host for all scholarly articles published in 1980 or later. They restricted their analysis to the past 40 years because the police-centric response to IPV arose in the 1980s. In total, their scoping review uncovered 36 studies that assessed generalized consequences of IPV policing beyond individual revictimization.

“In essence, we found that survivor criminalization is the most studied consequence of IPV policing, and existing studies have documented a positive association between mandatory arrest laws and risk of survivor arrest,” said Sandhya Kajeepeta, a researcher in the Department of Epidemiology  at Columbia Mailman School, and first author. “Additional longitudinal studies would strengthen understanding of the causal nature of this relationship.”

The authors also identified gaps in the evidence base, including a lack of studies focused on police violence or child protective services involvement as potential consequences of IPV policing despite case studies suggesting that these are consequences of IPV policing.

“While more research is needed to understand the specific public health consequences of using the criminal legal system as the primary response to IPV, we know enough to follow the lead of community organizations and survivor groups telling us that our current approach is ineffective and damaging,” said Seth Prins , PhD, assistant professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences and senior author. 

Kajeepeta also points out that only 31 percent of studies included a racial analysis of the consequences of IPV policing: “Of the studies that assessed differences among Black and white survivors, some found that Black survivors experienced more pronounced adverse outcomes compared to their white counterparts suggesting there may be a racialized impact of IPV policing. For example, one study documented that IPV arrest was associated with an increased risk of victim all-cause mortality, and this effect was largely explained by the effect among Black participants: arrest increased mortality by 98 percent among Black victims compared to 9 percent among white victims. The existing evidence demonstrates that there is an urgent need to critically re-evaluate the current police-centric response to IPV, including the widespread use of mandatory arrest laws. Current carceral and police-centric policies have societal costs, and have disparate impacts on Black communities,” she said.

Co-authors are Lisa M. Bates, Katherine M. Keyes, Emilie Bruzelius, and Melanie S. Askari, Columbia Mailman School; Zinzi D. Bailey, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine; and Dorothy E. Roberts, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

The study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.

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Stephanie Berger, [email protected]

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Fond du Lac SWAT team used to end standoff, get man off of International Paper building

Fond du Lac police took a man into custody after he fled to the roof of International Paper and refused to come down for more than six hours Tuesday.

The 34-year-old Fond du Lac man had had prior contact with law enforcement and has been "recently exhibiting escalating behaviors around the city," Police Chief Aaron Goldstein said.

"(He) was exhibiting bizarre and erratic behaviors, severe agitation, and threatened violence towards law enforcement," Goldstein said.

The incident began when officers were called to Fleet Farm, 800 S. Military Road, for a man who was wearing camouflage clothing and flashing what appeared to be a law enforcement badge while walking around the store.

When officers arrived, the man fled on foot out the store eastward and eventually southbound on railroad tracks, police said. Fond du Lac Police and Fond du Lac County Sheriff's deputies reported they saw the man climb up to the rooftop of International Paper via an exterior ladder on the side of the building, 981 S. Hickory St.

Officers said the man stood at the edge of the roof and yelled back at them, prompting the police department to urge the company's employees to shelter in place. Eventually, the employees were evacuated after more law enforcement officers arrived.

The police department deployed a drone/robot unit, an armored rescue vehicle, a K9 unit, and assembled a combined team of crisis negotiations members, a social worker and a Mental Health & Wellness police specialist.

After six hours without convincing the man to climb down, the police department activated its SWAT team. The man had armed himself with improvised weapons, including rocks and metal rebar stakes, Goldstein said, when they fired nondeadly munitions – 40-millimeter sponge rounds and Oleoresin Capsicum, which is designed to cause tearing of the eyes and involuntary eye closure – at him in order to subdue him.

"The use of a less-than-lethal impact munition and OC chemical munitions helped resolve this high-stress encounter while reducing the risk of injury to the individual and officers," Goldstein said.

The man was taken to a hospital for medical evaluation.

The Fond du Lac Police Department was assisted by the City of Fond du Lac Fire/Rescue, Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Office, Wisconsin State Patrol and a CN Police Service – North Division Special Agent.

Gun violence prevention advocacy groups pushing for more safety bills

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) - “This time, I don’t want to wait until another tragedy occurs,” said Saylor Reinders, MSU Students Demand Action.

Tragedies like the Oxford High School and Michigan State University (MSU) mass shootings. Saylor Reinders says that gun safety laws won’t bring her peers back.

“It’s about making sure that people aren’t dying because guns are the number one killer of kids today,” said Reinders. Leaders from Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action are pushing for more safety bills like banning guns at polling places. Kazia Kelly has carried a gun for four years, and she says education starts at home.

“That’s really why we want to pass safe homes, safe Schools,” said Kazia Kelly. “That’s where MDHHS is going to be if this gets passed: give home information to all families who attend Public Schools.”

Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a package of gun safety bills into law in 2023. Now, advocates say there’s still more to be done. And those same laws have the backing of many gun owners.

“Our ask, we want again to keep everyone safe,” said Kelly. “Our communities, our families, and I am a gun owner. Anyone who is a responsible gun owner knows we need secure storage, and we need measures in place again to keep everybody safe.”

News 10 reached out to the Michigan Coalition for Responsible Gun Owners and the Michigan Firearms Association for comment and did not receive a response.

Reinders says the gun prevention bills were a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t stop there.

“Gun violence is a very multifaceted issue, and it demands nuance solutions,” said Reinders. “So, while we can pass lots of legislation, I don’t think that’s the only solution. I think we also need community violence prevention.”

Violence prevention, they hope, stops the next shooting. Starting this week, if you buy things like trigger locks or gun safes, you do not need to pay sales tax on those items.

That was part of the legislation Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed into law after the shooting at MSU.

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France Sends More Police, Seeks Talks, to Quell New Caledonia Riots

A view of burnt cars in the aftermath of protests, ahead of a debate in the French National Assembly on changes to the New Caledonian constitution, that turned violent in Noumea, New Caledonia May 14, 2024 in this screengrab obtained from social media video. Livia Boucko/via REUTERS

By Kirsty Needham and Juliette Jabkhiro

WELLINGTON/PARIS (Reuters) - France sent extra police squadrons to quell riots on the Pacific island of New Caledonia on Tuesday but also opened the door to a negotiated settlement with pro- and anti-independence groups.

Overnight, rioters burnt cars, dozens of businesses, clashed with police and set up barricades to protest against plans to allow more people to take part in local elections in the French-ruled territory, which indigenous Kanak protesters reject.

The proposed changes, which the National Assembly in Paris will vote on later on Tuesday, would allow French residents who have lived in New Caledonia for 10 years to vote in provincial elections - a move local leaders fear will dilute the Kanak vote but the government says is needed so elections are democratic.

"The streets were on fire, they were rioting in the streets, quite a frightening experience actually," New Zealand tourist Mike Lightfoot told TVNZ television.

Despite a curfew, violence continued on Tuesday evening on the island, situated some 20,000 km (12,427 miles) from mainland France, local broadcaster NC La 1ere reported.

The island's capital Noumea was covered by a cloud of black smoke, NC La 1ere said, adding that a local sport facility had been set ablaze. It also reported a riot in a prison.

One of five island territories spanning the Indo-Pacific held by France, New Caledonia is the word's third-largest nickel producer and is the centrepiece of French President Emmanuel Macron's plan to increase Paris's influence in the Pacific.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said the vote should proceed in the afternoon as planned, but confirmed that Macron would not rush into convening a special congress of the two houses of parliament required to rubber-stamp the bill.

Instead, he would invite representatives of the territory's population - both pro- and anti-independence - to Paris for talks on the future status of New Caledonia, after decades of tensions over France's role.

"It's through talking, and only through talking, that we can find a solution," Attal told lawmakers. "All we want is to find an overall political agreement, with those in favour of and against independence."

He did not spell out what such a deal could cover.

At a rally in Paris, pro-independence protesters said the bill should be withdrawn.

"If there is violence today (in New Caledonia), it's in response to the violence we've suffered from since colonisation," Kanak youth leader Daniel Wea, 43, told Reuters, saying the planned electoral changes would leave the Kanaks isolated on their island.

"We're here to show ... we will fight until we get what we want: independence," said 24-year-old Wendy Gowe, whose grand-fathers died when violence flared up on the island in the 1980s.

New Caledonia is situated 1,500 km (930 miles) east of Australia, with a population of 270,000 including 41% Melanesian and 24% of European origin, mostly French.

A 1998 Noumea Accord helped end a decade of conflict by outlining a path to gradual autonomy and restricting voting to the indigenous Kanak as well as people who arrived in New Caledonia before 1998.

The accord allowed for three referendums to determine the future of the country. In all three, independence was rejected, but that did not end the debate over the island's status or France's role.

Meanwhile, French miner Eramet said its local unit SLN had raised its security level amid the unrest and that its plant was running at minimum capacity.

"Our mines are halted, just like the vast majority of mines in New Caledonia," a spokesperson told Reuters.

Nickel miner Prony Resources said it activated a crisis unit to "maintain our industrial facilities and prevent any damage to our assets".

The French government has been negotiating a rescue package for the loss-making New Caledonian nickel sector, including a commitment to supply Europe's battery supply chain, but talks have stalled amid current political tensions.

(Reporting by Lucy Craymer and Kirsty Needham in Wellington, Dominique Vidalon, Tassilo Hummel, Gus Trompiz, Elizabeth Pineau, Juliette Jabkhiro in Paris; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Neil Fullick, Stephen Coates, Christina Fincher, William Maclean)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand

The porn star testified for eight hours at donald trump’s hush-money trial. this is how it went..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

It’s 6:41 AM. I’m feeling a little stressed because I’m running late. It’s the fourth week of Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial. It’s a white collar trial. Most of the witnesses we’ve heard from have been, I think, typical white collar witnesses in terms of their professions.

We’ve got a former publisher, a lawyer, accountants. The witness today, a little less typical, Stormy Daniels, porn star in a New York criminal courtroom in front of a jury more accustomed to the types of witnesses they’ve already seen. There’s a lot that could go wrong.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today, what happened when Stormy Daniels took the stand for eight hours in the first criminal trial of Donald J. Trump. As before, my colleague Jonah Bromwich was inside the courtroom.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It’s Friday, May 10th.

So it’s now day 14 of this trial. And I think it’s worth having you briefly, and in broad strokes, catch listeners up on the biggest developments that have occurred since you were last on, which was the day that opening arguments were made by both the defense and the prosecution. So just give us that brief recap.

Sure. It’s all been the prosecution’s case so far. And prosecutors have a saying, which is that the evidence is coming in great. And I think for this prosecution, which is trying to show that Trump falsified business records to cover up a sex scandal, to ease his way into the White House in 2016, the evidence has been coming in pretty well. It’s come in well through David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer, who testified that he entered into a secret plot with Trump and Michael Cohen, his fixer at the time, to suppress negative stories about Trump, the candidate.

It came in pretty well through Keith Davidson, who was a lawyer to Stormy Daniels in 2016 and negotiated the hush money payment. And we’ve seen all these little bits and pieces of evidence that tell the story that prosecutors want to tell. And the case makes sense so far. We can’t tell what the jury is thinking, as we always say.

But we can tell that there’s a narrative that’s coherent and that matches up with the prosecution’s opening statement. Then we come to Tuesday. And that day really marks the first time that the prosecution’s strategy seems a little bit risky because that’s the day that Stormy Daniels gets called to the witness stand.

OK, well, just explain why the prosecution putting Stormy Daniels on the stand would be so risky. And I guess it makes sense to answer that in the context of why the prosecution is calling her as a witness at all.

Well, you can see why it makes sense to have her. The hush money payment was to her. The cover-up of the hush money payment, in some ways, concerns her. And so she’s this character who’s very much at the center of this story. But according to prosecutors, she’s not at the center of the crime. The prosecution is telling a story, and they hope a compelling one. And arguably, that story starts with Stormy Daniels. It starts in 2006, when Stormy Daniels says that she and Trump had sex, which is something that Trump has always denied.

So if prosecutors were to not call Stormy Daniels to the stand, you would have this big hole in the case. It would be like, effect, effect, effect. But where is the cause? Where is the person who set off this chain reaction? But Stormy Daniels is a porn star. She’s there to testify about sex. Sex and pornography are things that the jurors were not asked about during jury selection. And those are subjects that bring up all kinds of different complex reactions in people.

And so, when the prosecutors bring Stormy Daniels to the courtroom, it’s very difficult to know how the jurors will take it, particularly given that she’s about to describe a sexual episode that she says she had with the former president. Will the jurors think that makes sense, as they sit here and try to decide a falsifying business records case, or will they ask themselves, why are we hearing this?

So the reason why this is the first time that the prosecution’s strategy is, for journalists like you, a little bit confusing, is because it’s the first time that the prosecution seems to be taking a genuine risk in what they’re putting before these jurors. Everything else has been kind of cut and dry and a little bit more mechanical. This is just a wild card.

This is like live ammunition, to some extent. Everything else is settled and controlled. And they know what’s going to happen. With Stormy Daniels, that’s not the case.

OK, so walk us through the testimony. When the prosecution brings her to the stand, what actually happens?

It starts, as every witness does, with what’s called direct examination, which is a fancy word for saying prosecutors question Stormy Daniels. And they have her tell her story. First, they have her tell the jury about her education and where she grew up and her professional experience. And because of Stormy Daniels’s biography, that quickly goes into stripping, and then goes into making adult films.

And I thought the prosecutor who questioned her, Susan Hoffinger, had this nice touch in talking about that, because not only did she ask Daniels about acting in adult films. But she asked her about writing and directing them, too, emphasizing the more professional aspects of that work and giving a little more credit to the witness, as if to say, well, you may think this or you may think that. But this is a person with dignity who took what she did seriously. Got it.

What’s your first impression of Daniels as a witness?

It’s very clear that she’s nervous. She’s speaking fast. She’s laughing to herself and making small jokes. But the tension in the room is so serious from the beginning, from the moment she enters, that those jokes aren’t landing. So it just feels, like, really heavy and still and almost oppressive in there. So Daniels talking quickly, seeming nervous, giving more answers than are being asked of her by the prosecution, even before we get to the sexual encounter that she’s about to describe, all of that presents a really discomfiting impression, I would say.

And how does this move towards the encounter that Daniels ultimately has?

It starts at a golf tournament in 2006, in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Daniels meets Trump there. There are other celebrities there, too. They chatted very briefly. And then she received a dinner invitation from him. She thought it over, she says. And she goes to have dinner with Trump, not at a restaurant, by the way. But she’s invited to join him in the hotel suite.

So she gets to the hotel suite. And his bodyguard is there. And the hotel door is cracked open. And the bodyguard greets her and says she looks nice, this and that. And she goes in. And there’s Donald Trump, just as expected. But what’s not expected, she says, is that he’s not wearing what you would wear to a dinner with a stranger, but instead, she says, silk or satin pajamas. She asked him to change, she says. And he obliges.

He goes, and he puts on a dress shirt and dress pants. And they sit down at the hotel suite’s dining room table. And they have a kind of bizarre dinner. Trump is asking her very personal questions about pornography and safe sex. And she testifies that she teased him about vain and pompous he is. And then at some point, she goes to the bathroom. And she sees that he has got his toiletries in there, his Old Spice, his gold tweezers.

Very specific details.

Yeah, we’re getting a ton of detail in this scene. And the reason we’re getting those is because prosecutors are trying to elicit those details to establish that this is a credible person, that this thing did happen, despite what Donald Trump and his lawyers say. And the reason you can know it happened, prosecutors seem to be saying, is because, look at all these details she can still summon up.

She comes out of the bathroom. And she says that Donald Trump is on the hotel bed. And what stands out to me there is what she describes as a very intense physical reaction. She says that she blacked out. And she quickly clarifies, she doesn’t mean from drugs or alcohol. She means that, she says, that the intensity of this experience was such that, suddenly, she can’t remember every detail. The prosecution asks a question that cuts directly to the sex. Essentially, did you start having sex with him? And Daniels says that she did. And she continues to provide more details than even, I think, the prosecution wanted.

And I think we don’t want to go chapter and verse through this claimed sexual encounter. But I wonder what details stand out and which details feel important, given the prosecution’s strategy here.

All the details stand out because it’s a story about having had sex with a former president. And the more salacious and more private the details feel, the more you’re going to remember them. So we’ll remember that Stormy Daniels said what position they had sex in. We’ll remember that she said he didn’t use a condom. Whether that’s important to the prosecution’s case, now, that’s a much harder question to answer, as we’ve been saying.

But what I can tell you is, as she’s describing having had sex with Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is sitting right there, and Eric Trump, his son, is sitting behind him, seeming to turn a different color as he hears this embarrassment of his father being described to a courtroom full of reporters at this trial, it’s hard to even describe the energy in that room. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. And it was just Daniels’s testimony and, seemingly, the former President’s emotions. And you almost felt like you were trapped in there with both of them as this description was happening.

Well, I think it’s important to try to understand why the prosecution is getting these details, these salacious, carnal, pick your word, graphic details about sex with Donald Trump. What is the value, if other details are clearly making the point that she’s recollecting something?

Well, I think, at this point, we can only speculate. But one thing we can say is, this was uncomfortable. This felt bad. And remember, prosecutor’s story is not about the sex. It’s about trying to hide the sex. So if you’re trying to show a jury why it might be worthwhile to hide a story, it might be worth —

Providing lots of salacious details that a person would want to hide.

— exposing them to how bad that story feels and reminding them that if they had been voters and they had heard that story, and, in fact, they asked Daniels this very question, if you hadn’t accepted hush money, if you hadn’t signed that NDA, is this the story you would have told? And she said, yes. And so where I think they’re going with this, but we can’t really be sure yet, is that they’re going to tell the jurors, hey, that story, you can see why he wanted to cover that up, can’t you?

You mentioned the hush money payments. What testimony does Daniels offer about that? And how does it advance the prosecution’s case of business fraud related to the hush money payments?

So little evidence that it’s almost laughable. She says that she received the hush money. But we actually already heard another witness, her lawyer at the time, Keith Davidson, testify that he had received the hush money payment on her behalf. And she testified about feeling as if she had to sell this story because the election was fast approaching, almost as if her leverage was slipping away because she knew this would be bad for Trump.

That feels important. But just help me understand why it’s important.

Well, what the prosecution has been arguing is that Trump covered up this hush money payment in order to conceal a different crime. And that crime, they say, was to promote his election to the presidency by illegal means.

Right, we’ve talked about this in the past.

So when Daniels ties her side of the payment into the election, it just reminds the jurors maybe, oh, right, this is what they’re arguing.

So how does the prosecution end this very dramatic, and from everything you’re saying, very tense questioning of Stormy Daniels about this encounter?

Well, before they can even end, the defense lawyers go and they consult among themselves. And then, with the jury out of the room, one of them stands up. And he says that the defense is moving for a mistrial.

On what terms?

He says that the testimony offered by Daniels that morning is so prejudicial, so damning to Trump in the eyes of the jury, that the trial can no longer be fair. Like, how could these jurors have heard these details and still be fair when they render their verdict? And he says a memorable expression. He says, you can’t un-ring that bell, meaning they heard it. They can’t un-hear it. It’s over. Throw out this trial. It should be done.

Wow. And what is the response from the judge?

So the judge, Juan Merchan, he hears them out. And he really hears them out. But at the end of their arguments, he says, I do think she went a little too far. He says that. He said, there were things that were better left unsaid.

By Stormy Daniels?

By Stormy Daniels. And he acknowledges that she is a difficult witness. But, he says, the remedy for that is not a mistrial, is not stopping the whole thing right now. The remedy for that is cross-examination. If the defense feels that there are issues with her story, issues with her credibility, they can ask her whatever they want. They can try to win the jury back over. If they think this jury has been poisoned by this witness, well, this is their time to provide the antidote. The antidote is cross-examination. And soon enough, cross-examination starts. And it is exactly as intense and combative as we expected.

We’ll be right back.

So, Jonah, how would you characterize the defense’s overall strategy in this intense cross-examination of Stormy Daniels?

People know the word impeach from presidential impeachments. But it has a meaning in law, too. You impeach a witness, and, specifically, their credibility. And that’s what the defense is going for here. They are going to try to make Stormy Daniels look like a liar, a fraud, an extortionist, a money-grubbing opportunist who wanted to take advantage of Trump and sought to do so by any means necessary.

And what did that impeachment strategy look like in the courtroom?

The defense lawyer who questions Stormy Daniels is a woman named Susan Necheles. She’s defended Trump before. And she’s a bit of a cross-examination specialist. We even saw her during jury selection bring up these past details to confront jurors who had said nasty things about Trump on social media with. And she wants to do the same thing with Daniels. She wants to bring up old interviews and old tweets and things that Daniels has said in the past that don’t match what Daniels is saying from the stand.

What’s a specific example? And do they land?

Some of them land. And some of them don’t. One specific example is that Necheles confronts Daniels with this old tweet, where Daniels says that she’s going to dance down the street if Trump goes to jail. And what she’s trying to show there is that Daniels is out for revenge, that she hates Trump, and that she wants to see him go to jail. And that’s why she’s testifying against him.

And Daniels is very interesting during the cross-examination. It’s almost as if she’s a different person. She kind of squares her shoulders. And she sits up a little straighter. And she leans forward. Daniels is ready to fight. But it doesn’t quite land. The tweet actually says, I’ll dance down the street when he’s selected to go to jail.

And Daniels goes off on this digression about how she knows that people don’t get selected to go to jail. That’s not how it works. But she can’t really unseat this argument, that she’s a political enemy of Donald Trump. So that one kind of sticks, I would say. But there are other moves that Necheles tries to pull that don’t stick.

So unlike the prosecution, which typically used words like adult, adult film, Necheles seems to be taking every chance she can get to say porn, or pornography, or porn star, to make it sound base or dirty. And so when she starts to ask Daniels about actually being in pornography, writing, acting, and directing sex films, she tries to land a punch line, Necheles does. She says, so you have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real, right?

As if to say, perhaps this story you have told about entering Trump’s suite in Lake Tahoe and having sex with him was made up.

Just another one of your fictional stories about sex. But Daniels comes back and says, the sex in the films, it’s very much real, just like what happened to me in that room. And so, when you have this kind of combat of a lawyer cross-examining very aggressively and the witness fighting back, you can feel the energy in the room shift as one lands a blow or the other does. But here, Daniels lands one back. And the other issue that I think Susan Necheles runs into is, she tries to draw out disparities from interviews that Daniels gave, particularly to N-TOUCH, very early on once the story was out.

It’s kind of like a tabloid magazine?

But some of the disparities don’t seem to be landing quite like Necheles would want. So she tries to do this complicated thing about where the bodyguard was in the room when Daniels walked into the room, as described in an interview in a magazine. But in that magazine interview, as it turns out, Daniels mentioned that Trump was wearing pajamas. And so, if I’m a juror, I don’t care where the bodyguard is. I’m thinking about, oh, yeah, I remember that Stormy Daniels said now in 2024 that Trump was wearing pajamas.

I’m curious if, as somebody in the room, you felt that the defense was effective in undermining Stormy Daniels’s credibility? Because what I took from the earlier part of our conversation was that Stormy Daniels is in this courtroom on behalf of the prosecution to tell a story that’s uncomfortable and has the kind of details that Donald Trump would be motivated to try to hide. And therefore, this defense strategy is to say, those details about what Trump might want to hide, you can’t trust them. So does this back and forth effectively hurt Stormy Daniels’s credibility, in your estimation?

I don’t think that Stormy Daniels came off as perfectly credible about everything she testified about. There are incidents that were unclear or confusing. There were things she talked about that I found hard to believe, when she, for instance, denied that she had attacked Trump in a tweet or talked about her motivations. But about what prosecutors need, that central story, the story of having had sex with him, we can’t know whether it happened.

But there weren’t that many disparities in these accounts over the years. In terms of things that would make me doubt the story that Daniels was telling, details that don’t add up, those weren’t present. And you don’t have to take my word for that, nor should you. But the judge is in the room. And he says something very, very similar.

What does he say? And why does he say it?

Well, he does it when the defense, again, at the end of the day on Thursday, calls for a mistrial.

With a similar argument as before?

Not only with a similar argument as before, but, like, almost the exact same argument. And I would say that I was astonished to see them do this. But I wasn’t because I’ve covered other trials where Trump is the client. And in those trials, the lawyers, again and again, called for a mistrial.

And what does Judge Marchan say in response to this second effort to seek a mistrial?

Let me say, to this one, he seems a little less patient. He says that after the first mistrial ruling, two days before, he went into his chambers. And he read every decision he had made about the case. He took this moment to reflect on the first decision. And he found that he had, in his own estimation, which is all he has, been fair and not allowed evidence that was prejudicial to Trump into this trial. It could continue. And so he said that again. And then he really almost turned on the defense. And he said that the things that the defense was objecting to were things that the defense had made happen.

He says that in their opening statement, the defense could have taken issue with many elements of the case, about whether there were falsified business records, about any of the other things that prosecutors are saying happened. But instead, he says, they focused their energy on denying that Trump ever had sex with Daniels.

And so that was essentially an invitation to the prosecution to call Stormy Daniels as a witness and have her say from the stand, yes, I had this sexual encounter. The upshot of it is that the judge not only takes the defense to task. But he also just says that he finds Stormy Daniels’s narrative credible. He doesn’t see it as having changed so much from year to year.

Interesting. So in thinking back to our original question here, Jonah, about the idea that putting Stormy Daniels on the stand was risky, I wonder if, by the end of this entire journey, you’re reevaluating that idea because it doesn’t sound like it ended up being super risky. It sounded like it ended up working reasonably well for the prosecution.

Well, let me just assert that it doesn’t really matter what I think. The jury is going to decide this. There’s 12 people. And we can’t know what they’re thinking. But my impression was that, while she was being questioned by the prosecution for the prosecution’s case, Stormy Daniels was a real liability. She was a difficult witness for them.

And the judge said as much. But when the defense cross-examined her, Stormy Daniels became a better witness, in part because their struggles to discredit her may have actually ended up making her story look more credible and stronger. And the reason that matters is because, remember, we said that prosecutors are trying to fill this hole in their case. Well, now, they have. The jury has met Stormy Daniels. They’ve heard her account. They’ve made of it what they will. And now, the sequence of events that prosecutors are trying to line up as they seek prison time for the former President really makes a lot of sense.

It starts with what Stormy Daniels says with sex in a hotel suite in 2006. It picks up years later, as Donald Trump is trying to win an election and, prosecutors say, suppressing negative stories, including Stormy Daniels’s very negative story. And the story that prosecutors are telling ends with Donald Trump orchestrating the falsification of business records to keep that story concealed.

Well, Jonah, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Of course, thanks for having me.

The prosecution’s next major witness will be Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer who arranged for the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. Cohen is expected to take the stand on Monday.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a defiant response to warnings from the United States that it would stop supplying weapons to Israel if Israel invades the Southern Gaza City of Rafah. So far, Israel has carried out a limited incursion into the city where a million civilians are sheltering, but has threatened a full invasion. In a statement, Netanyahu said, quote, “if we need to stand alone, we will stand alone.”

Meanwhile, high level ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been put on hold in part because of anger over Israel’s incursion into Rafah.

A reminder, tomorrow, we’ll be sharing the latest episode of our colleague’s new show, “The Interview” This week on “The Interview,” Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with radio host Charlamagne Tha God about his frustrations with how Americans talk about politics.

If me as a Black man, if I criticize Democrats, then I’m supporting MAGA. But if I criticize, you know, Donald Trump and Republicans, then I’m a Democratic shill. Why can’t I just be a person who deals in nuance?

Today’s episode was produced by Olivia Natt and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Lexie Diao, with help from Paige Cowett, contains original music by Will Reid and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.

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Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Jonah E. Bromwich

Produced by Olivia Natt and Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Lexie Diao

With Paige Cowett

Original music by Will Reid and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

This episode contains descriptions of an alleged sexual liaison.

What happened when Stormy Daniels took the stand for eight hours in the first criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump?

Jonah Bromwich, one of the lead reporters covering the trial for The Times, was in the room.

On today’s episode

Jonah E. Bromwich , who covers criminal justice in New York for The New York Times.

Background reading

In a second day of cross-examination, Stormy Daniels resisted the implication she had tried to shake down Donald J. Trump by selling her story of a sexual liaison.

Here are six takeaways from Ms. Daniels’s earlier testimony.

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The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state criminal courts in Manhattan. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

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