Dígame Concejal
@RSGAT
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Htfd. City Councilman Josh Michtom: dad, husband, law-brawler, musician, artist, professor; opinions my own; 'CT Dems aren't socialist enough for this clown.'
Hartford, CT
Joined July 2009
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I was at a listening session last week in Frog Hollow for Hartford residents to talk about what they want to see in a new police chief. I didn't say anything (other than when I took over Spanish interpretation duties), but I heard a lot of residents talk about not feeling safe...
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You don't need a Social Security Number to get a vaccine. But when you sign up for the online system, it asks for one. They don't tell you this (unless you call), but you can just put all zeroes and proceed. THAT'S A NEEDLESS BARRIER TO ACCESS.
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How does TSA pre-check make any sense from a security perspective? We start from the premise that *anyone* could be the person who fills a water bottle with explosive liquid or builds a bomb into their laptop - or shoe! - but if they pay $80, then they definitely won't do that?
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OK, let me tell you a story. A child is born and both the mother and the baby test positive for cocaine. So DCF removes the child from the hospital. Eventually, the child is returned to both parents under a period of agency supervision. 1/27
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When I tried to get a fancy law firm summer job to pay some bills, the interviewer said, "Tell me something about you that's not law-related and that you're proud of," and when I told her I'd hemmed the pants of my suit that morning, she looked horrified. Well, 20 years later...
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...I'm a real lawyer and I make enough money without working at a big firm and I hemmed the sleeve of my wuit jacket today before trial. I am winning.
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For the first time in over ten years representing parents, I got a judge to order DCF to provide a parent with housing, and it was "within three weeks, by any means necessary, even if the agency has to pay for a hotel." I cannot fully explain how huge that is.
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How do we convince a majority of people that policing is one of the least effective, most costly, most destructive ways to achieve real public safety? I think reporting is a big problem. Data largely support the idea that prioritizing police spending is irrational, but...
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I maintain that pre-check is bad and elitist, even though it's cheap. When you make basic services have an extra cost and require users to opt in, the result is always to exclude users with fewer resources...
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The fact that pre-check speeds up check-in without increasing actual security breaches just proves that pre-check rules should be universal.
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19. This is a case where the state traumatized a child and then tried to hold the child's perfectly competent parent responsible for that trauma, and in the process, profoundly complicated the child's life in the future (because we might win this and get the kid reunified).
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21. The fact that this case even made it to trial indicates a profound breakdown in institutional decision-making, resting on a broad-based lack of genuine concern for poor people.
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It's like if you could pay ahead of time for a sticker to put on your car that allowed you legally to slow down but not stop at stop signs. Either a full stop at a stop sign is important for safety or it's not.
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The online portal refers you to a medical portal, which then asks you to sign in. After you've signed in, you don't bounce back to the COVID vaccine page. You're at the home page and you have to find the vaccine page, which is not obvious. THAT'S A NEEDLESS BARRIER TO ACCESS.
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20. They further traumatized this father, who cried on the stand when he testified about the police coming to his house to take his kid. The Spanish-speaking parenting program caseworker, by the way, testified that he had NO CONCERNS about dad's abilities as a parent.
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A dropdown menu on the state portal asks for your health insurance. You don't need health insurance to get the vaccine, but the "No Insurance" option is all the way at the bottom of the dropdown list. You have to scroll to see it. THAT'S A NEEDLESS BARRIER TO ACCESS.
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26. Instead, DCF finds people at their lives' lowest ebb, deals them the devastating blow of removing their children, and then says, "Get on this 3-month waitlist for therapy and this 6-month waitlist for housing (each of which requires many phone calls to many agencies),...
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25. Most DV cases where mother and child were victims could be solved without removal if DCF just rented the mother an apartment. Many drug cases just need DCF to financially support addicts while they do treatment, so they don't have to look for work & housing at the same time.
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@rachelsklar
That's what I thought! I guess it was a valuable lesson about workplace culture and why I was never gonna be cut out for those places (which I knew already). Glad I'm a public defender now!
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17. To be clear, this is not just me seeing the case through rose-colored glasses. I represent the mother here, who didn't fight termination of her own rights and asked me to advocate for the dad. Other court personnel have quietly mentioned to me how crazy DCF's position is.
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24. Assign a Spanish-speaking social worker or hire a dedicated interpreter; pay for a tablet and a hotspot for a few months. But there is a world of cases where DCF could invest more at the front end and preserve families for the benefit of parents and children.
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22. As long as the same agency and the same employees are responsible for reunifying families and then, after a certain point, making the case that families *shouldn't* be reunified, we will see the agency predetermine a family's failure for its own convenience.
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Four or five years ago, I litigated two very challenging trials to get a woman's three little kids returned to her. Now she texts me first day of school pics every year and it is the absolute fucking best.
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Y'all, if they ask for something but don't insist on it, that still discourages undocumented people from getting the service! There is absolutely a way to solicit information like this while making clear that it's not required.
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23. This will happen most where the parents are the most vulnerable: here, the father is poor, not well-educated, and only speaks Spanish. This case feels especially shocking because there were so many instances where the agency only had to do a little bit more:
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OK, so folks are pointing out that pre-check requires a background check and that many prior convictions prevent people from getting pre-check. And to that I say this: almost none of the disqualifying elements is a useful predictor of the kind of conduct that affects air safety.
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27. attend supervised weekly visits in a conference room with a stranger watching, try to find work, and stay out of trouble in the mean time." Then they carefully document the parents' failures, large and small, and present them to a court after two years as proof of unfitness.
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present and future clients if I don't bear witness in some way. The roots of this problem are structural, but they will never get addressed if the structure continues to churn on in darkness.
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18. And I try a lot of cases and have been around long enough to recognize that not all of them reek of injustice and state overreach. But holy shit.
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2. This is not so much a failure of any individual CPS worker as a failure of the system. When the same people are responsible for keeping families together and justifying their decision to separate them, they are forced into bad choices, no matter how good their intentions.
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(Ha ha. I know that this sticker exists in real life. It's called "being white." But I digress...)
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Look, I'm an anti-carceralist. I recognize that the remedy for someone's car alarm going off constantly for hours on a Saturday morning isn't to involve the police. We need a community solution. The neighbors need to set the car on fire.
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11. They tell him to get what he can out of the groups, but after four sessions, he's like, "I'm missing work to sit quietly while other fathers talk in a language I can't understand?" So he stops doing groups.
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5. After that, DCF's concern with the father is that he "failed to show insight into the harm that parental drug use can do to children." They aren't alleging that *he* used drugs. They aren't even alleging that the mom's drug use actually affected the kid after birth.
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Since this is getting retweeted a lot, let me add a few things:
1. I have been careful not to share names, locations, or the gender or current age of the child. I know I am walking a fine line with confidentiality, but I earnestly believe that I doa disservice to...
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3. There are grassroots efforts all over to reform how CPS operates, so it's worth finding out who's doing what in your jurisdiction. ASFA is the fed. law that imposes timelines on state agencies and encourages needless family separation, so check out .
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10. The visits go pretty well, but the kid speaks less and less Spanish, having been placed in an English-speaking household. The dad is referred to a fatherhood support program. The first caseworker he gets doesn't speak Spanish. He's referred to group therapy ... in English.
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9. So now the dad is on his own. He has his own apartment. He does the phone visits. Eventually, in-person visits resume, once a week, and he does those. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the kid freaks the fuck out when being put in a state car before visits. I WONDER WHY.
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7. The dad only speaks Spanish, but DCF assigns a monolingual, English-speaking caseworker. Covid hits and they cut off in-person visits. Parents can't get DCF's oddball video visit software to work on their phones. Does DCF provide a tablet and hotspot?
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6. The cops being present for the removal results (of course) in the dad getting charged with assaulting an officer, and leads to a criminal no-contact order with his child. Eventually, the charges get dismissed and visitation can begin.
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14. (b) failed to understand his child's serious mental health and trauma needs, all of which stem from the removal;
(c) failed to show sufficient interest in his child's treatment by attending doctors' appointments that he didn't schedule and that took place during his workday;
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8. Nope. They switch to AUDIO-ONLY VISITS WITH A THREE-YEAR-OLD. In the mean time, the mother keeps testing positive for cocaine, so she eventually realizes (to her great credit) that she will be an impediment to the kid and dad reunifying. So she moves across the country.
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Maybe I am being too proscriptive, but it's possible that owning a whole extra house that sits empty most of the year means that the Marx, Engels, and Trotsky aren't hitting right?
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13. At trial, they argue that this father
(a) failed to show insight into the effects of parental drug use on children, even though by then, the father had been out of a relationship with the mother and living alone for nearly a year;
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12. He still goes to meet with his English-speaking caseworker, though. And eventually, he gets a Spanish-speaking fatherhood support caseworker, with whom he engages fully. DCF, meanwhile, files a petition to terminate the father's parental rights.
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4. Guess what? The dad and the child are alone in the dad's apartment. Where they're supposed to be. But a DCF worker and two cops storm in. A cop throws the dad on the floor and puts a knee in his back. The 2-year-old child sees it all, and then gets placed with strangers.
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15. (d) failed to show sufficient interest in his child's development by reaching out to teachers and therapists in the white, English-speaking suburb where the child had been placed;
(e) can't care for the child because the child doesn't speak Spanish; and
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This Jessica Krug essay raises an interesting question for me, which I'm sure folks have explored before: why do white scholars and activists frequently find it so hard to engage with matters of importance to Black people and other people of color without some masquerade?
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2. Part of the supervision is that the mother has to take drug tests. When some of her tests come back positive, DCF tells the parents, "You have to live apart and the child has to live with the father. The mother can't have unsupervised contact." The family immediately complies.
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16. (f) should have his rights terminated because the child is strongly bonded to the foster family and needs permanence and a high level of care for trauma.
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3. DCF never gets information that the family isn't complying, but three days later, they show up with cops to remove the child again. They go to the mom's apartment and say, "Where's your kid?" She says, "I don't know. Go next door to dad's building and see if they're there."
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Love to be writing notes in a legal pad for a closing argument, flip to the next page, and find this:
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The problem is that crimes involving airplane safety are so rare that there's really nothing bureaucratic you can do to predict who's more likely to do them. Most of these offenses have nothing to do with safety and a lot to do with law enforcement. In other words...
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@Frediculous
It's below my "never work again" number, but it *might* hit my "work at something else for less money number," especially since it is WAY more than my "pay off my house" number.
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Go back and look at prior acts of airplane-related terrorism and see how many would have been prevented by these restrictions:
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This is the kind of direct constituent engagement with municipal action we need more of.
I’m crying this dude made a diss track on the Detroit sign they just put up 😭😭
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This is
@cvspharmacy
, tonight, denying vaccine access to someone in my family on the basis of citizenship status. If it happened this time, it's happening more and people are getting turned away.
I told the person. I asked her if this was a specific policy for
@cvspharmacy
because I knew that this was not the policy in other places. She said YES that this was their policy, to specifically discriminate people because of immigration status. "Only US Citizens" (her words).
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Are we singing "vaccine" to the tune of "Roxanne" or "Jolene"?
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(5) the following exchange:
Me: Has DCF attempted to pay a landlord or hotel directly to obtain housing for [parent]?
Worker: No.
Me: Why not?
Worker: That's not something DCF does.
Me: Why not?
Worker: I don't know.
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This required (1) possibly the most parent-friendly judge in the state; (2) the support of the child's lawyer; (3) evidence that my client obtained subsidies and is participating in a housing assistance program but landlords won't play ball (a widespread problem); ...
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And murder? Do we honestly think someone who was convicted of murder, did their time, and is now out and free of any interstate travel restrictions is likely to... blow up a plane? This is just one of those gratuitous post-conviction legal handicaps, like disenfranchisement.
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Ugh. When you say "parents can choose whether to send their kids back to school," you're actually saying "we're shifting the public health burden to families with fewer resources." Choice is illusory in wage-based capitalism.
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@cordeliareagan
Closing arguments were today. I came back from court and wrote that thread with the dwindling energy from my rage-filled argument. So it's in the judge's hands now.
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There is an actual, objectively right answer here. But the folks from whom the public expects objective right answers aren't delivering it. Instead, it comes from people like me, who can be dismissed as wild-eyed idealists and cop-haters.
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People with these convictions are people whom TSA thinks are likely to be carrying drugs and other contraband, and they don't want to miss the opportunity to search their bags. But someone carrying a a brick in his backpack doesn't compromise other passengers' safety.
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They should not prosecute a crime committed by a first-grader. This is not actually a difficult question.
A 6-year-old child shot his teacher at a Virginia elementary school on Friday, police say.
Now authorities face an uncomfortable question: How should they prosecute a crime committed by a first-grader?
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What if I told you that defendants in criminal and child welfare cases routinely lose their jobs because they must attend court dates, and those jobs are often critical to their getting more favorable outcomes in their cases?
If the Trump's DC trial last 4-6 weeks starting in January 2024, Trump would have to be in DC. as a defendant at trial, during the Iowa caucus and NH primaries (unless there's time off for those). Whatever you think of Trump, that's not a happy situation.
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An important rule for trial lawyers is that when the judge says, "Any redirect?" or "Any recross?" and the lawyer does have more questions, they have to start by saying, "Very briefly." After that, they can go for as long as they like.
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(4) compelling testimony from my client's therapist that housing is a barrier to my client's mental health stability and participation in other services; and ...
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most reporting presents it like this: "Politician So-and-so said that the money would be more effectively spent on prevention and quality of like programs, but Police Chief Blah Blah said a reduction in police funding would lead to increases in crime." The thing is...
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Everyone's heaping praise on Zelensky, but personally, I don't appreciate him setting such a high standard for 44-year-old, bilingual, Jewish law school graduates who work for the government.
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I think if you're the white lawyer for a child protection agency and you're making an argument that two Black parents shouldn't get their baby back, you maybe shouldn't say "Responsibility just isn't in their DNA."
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@jdesmondharris
@MF_Greatest
THANK YOU. Some day, someone will figure out how to say, "This basic acknowledgment of humanity was good and necessary" without also implying that mixed race couples are the cure to structural racism.
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I UNDERSTAND THAT SVB BANK IS NOT ACTUALLY GETTING BAILED OUT. THIS IS A JOKE FOR THE INTERNET. WILLEM DAFOE ALSO NEVER SAID THIS IN A MOVIE.
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The Zobrist List: Top Ten Surnames of MLB Players That Could Be The Names Of Prescription Medications
10. Lorenzen
9. Valaika
8. Kimbrel
7. Altuve
6. Cimber
5. Butera
4. Mantiply
3. Adiranza
2. Quantrill
1. Profar
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@danblackroyd
@brokeymcpoverty
Like when Coors is like, "OUR BEER IS VERY COLD. COLD LIKE THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. THE COLDEST."
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@typolad
@nycsouthpaw
In '05, in Boston, I was in a bicycle accident.
EMT: What's the date.
Me: I never know the date. Ask me another.
EMT: Who's the president.
Me: Ugh, that fuckin' guy.
EMT: He's OK.
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@InsomniosAticos
No sabés cuanto nos cuesta a los yanquis comprender lo que es estudiar en una universidad allá. Lo nuestro es quads y frat parties y todo eso.
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I would like Democrats to familiarize themselves with the "or what?" philosophy of exercising power. I learned this in my Brooklyn youth, where it was pronounced "uh wha?" It works like this:
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@Katchin05
I assume he's so good looking that people find him unapproachable, and that's why no one has ever tried to teach him about rhythm.
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@lindaholmes
The "I also own framed Nazi memorabilia" is right up there with "If THAT'S how you define consent, I've committed sexual assault too!" Also, a lot of the same people.
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@shannonahouston
The thing to do is find out how CPS operates where you live, find out who's working on reform, and support them. The dad in this case had an excellent lawyer and I, representing the mom, who also wanted the dad to get the kid, did my damnedest. But the structure is the problem.
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In that sense, the whole plane security apparatus, which is largely theater, is in some sense an invented, unreasonable obstacle to get people to consent to broader state intrusion in exchange for access to a more reasonable amount of airplane security. It's genius, really.
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It would be good even if a broader array of the politicians who know the right answer (and believe me, many of them know) were willing to say it out loud.
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