This City’s Police Want to Protect Your Right to Privacy

What did the Seattle Police Department do when an activist requested their entire archive of patrol car videos — all 1.6 million videos? For the hometown of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the answer was easy: Seattle’s cops went to the computer nerds.

Law enforcement agencies are promising body cameras will bring a new era of accountability by capturing cops’ every interaction on film in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and other cities encouraged by Obama’s promise of $263 million in funding. But all that video presents a technical problem: how can a department possibly sort and release so many hours of footage? Stepping up its commitment to transparency and collaboration, Seattle’s police asked 80 local tech wizards from Amazon, Microsoft and Evidence.com to streamline the disclosure process at its first department-sponsored hackathon earlier this month.

“We’re having a conversation about transparency and privacy. How do the two intersect?” Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, a spokesperson, tells the The Seattle Times. “How can the Seattle Police Department share terabytes of information we’re storing?”

Citizens only feel cameras increase accountability if they trust the devices are used properly, if they cannot be switched off at critical moments or if the video won’t be buried by scandal-averse commanders. But police departments cannot simply post raw video of every arrest to YouTube. To protect individuals’ privacy, state law prevents police from releasing details like the faces of juveniles or sexual assault victims as well medical details or mental health history, explains Mary Perry, the police department’s counsel.

But currently, removing a simple cut from a one-minute video “can take specialists upward of half an hour, whereas more complicated edits — like blurring multiple faces or pieces of audio — can take much, much longer,” an S.P.D. statement says. That’s a problem when the police are already burning an average of 7,000 DVDs every month and will have even more as body cams are rolled out for the entire force.

Technologies like image-recognition seem to be the police’s best bet for a quicker, cheaper way to systematically redact sensitive information. “Government agencies don’t jump out to me to be at the forefront of technology research,” says Simon Winder, head of Impressive Machines, a tech company focused on robotics, machine learning and recognition software. But with such huge tasks, cities are primed to adopt cutting-edge solutions. “There are so many ways we can yet use technology,” Seattle’s mayor Ed Murray responds. “We want to be the number one digital city.”

One of the recurring topics the hackers discussed was what to do when an algorithm makes an error in identifying a person or a frame of video, particularly because so many are shot in the dark of night or in the blur of pursuing a suspect. “The problem is you can’t just say ‘oops’ when you violate someone’s right to privacy,” says Brandon Arp, a software developer at Groupon who attended the hackathon. He proposed a “very conservative” system that hides more information from a clip than required by law but allows for a person to request a manual secondary review of individual redactions.

Ideas like this emerged over the five-hour brainstorming session (and free lunch) in the basement of police headquarters, prompting officials to predict they will become a national model. Officer Patrick Michaud says he was “blown away” by the hackathon. “Options came out of it, which is what we look for,” he tells The Seattle Times. “A different way to look for problems always works for us.”

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How Deep-Fried Food Can Reduce Our Fossil Fuel Addiction

You’d expect that oils from McDonald’s deep-fryer traps, fat from slaughtered pigs and cattle and the grease caught in city sewer traps would be pretty much useless, right? But two researchers are investigating how to recycle all those leftover oils and fats into biodiesel motor fuel, an alternative that can reduce our dependence on oil.
After a decade in the lab, two Minnesota chemical engineers are designing a plant that will convert yellow and brown grease into fuel. With so many experiments, they’ve found a way that’s cheaper and more energy-efficient than the alternatives, like soybean-based biodiesel. Kirk Cobb and Joe Valdespino, the brains behind Superior Process Technologies, a little-known chemical company in Minneapolis, will soon have their ideas put into practice at a full-scale refinery near downtown Los Angeles that can churn out 20 million gallons of biodiesel annually.
“Our process is superior to the traditional method,” Valdespino tells the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “It saves energy. It increases yield. It enables you to use cheaper feedstocks,” he says, referring to the raw material inputted to machines.
Biodiesel took off after major environmental legislation in 2005 and 2007 and a farm bill in 2008 that contained several incentives. At the last count by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the country has roughly 100 producers, with most output clustered in the Midwestern states of Texas, Iowa, Missouri and Illinois. Most of them rely on soybean, canola and corn oils for their raw material — about 2.2 billion pounds worth just in the first half of this year. Animal fats (403 million pounds) and other recycled grease (535 million pounds), on the other hand, lag behind in the industry.
Cobb and Valdespino are hoping greater efficiency will change that. The pair became friends fifteen years ago while working for a paper company in Savannah, Ga., where they converted resin from the pulp of pine trees into profitable adhesives, plastics and inks. After 24 years on the job, Cobb left to work on biodiesel at Superior Process Technologies in 2004 and hired Valdespino in 2007.
Since then, they’ve been laying the groundwork for a tactic that diverges from the rest of the field. Other refiners add sulfuric acid to remove fat, but that reaction creates water which contaminates other key compounds like methanol and must be removed — a “really messy” and “very limited” business, Valdespino says. Their company adds glycerol at around 450 degrees, enough heat to evaporate the water and skip the extra step of eliminating impurities.
“People misconstrue higher temperatures with higher energy use,” says Cobb. “That is not the case.” Cobb says the plant will be able to do the job better — using six times less energy than the standard method — and provide diesel to large customers like airliners and the Navy at lower prices.
Almost all the industry’s innovation had been fueled by hefty support from the federal government, but most of those tax credits, loans and grants recently expired. Cobb and Valdespino are hoping the incentives return, so that for once, greasy fat can actually do something good for America.

The Exotic Birds and Suffering Veterans That Are Helping Each Other Heal

The V.A. complex in West Los Angeles boasts an unexpected feature: the Serenity Park Parrot Sanctuary, which offers nursing care and refuge to exotic birds left without owners.
Veteran Matthew Simmons started the sanctuary, which is funded by donations, after serving in the Navy during Operation Desert Storm. The facility rehabilitates sick or injured birds, and in the process helps troubled vets, too. “If you’re not offered a ledge up, it’s a very deep pit, and there’s lots of guys down there,” Simmons tells NBC 2.
One person benefitting from these beautiful creatures is Coast Guard veteran Lily Love. She suffered from PTSD after her service, prompting to five trips to the V.A. psychiatric ward, but ever since she started spending time at Serenity Park, she’s stayed out of the hospital. Love is now in charge of the kitchen, preparing meals for parrots each day starting at 6 a.m. She says that working with the birds, “takes me out of myself.”
Navy veteran Bob Corell describes the time he spends Serenity Park as his “salvation.” “I think I’m a little kinder. A little gentler than I was before I got here,” he says.
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Minorities Should Want To Be Police Officers

One of the first facts people noticed after a white police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., was that only three of the 53 cops on the local force were black. That’s nowhere near the city’s racial composition, where two-thirds of residents are African-American.
Though the number of minority cops has grown over the past two decades, this lack of diversity is the norm in hundreds of departments across the country, while the key to recruiting and retaining minority officers remains elusive for most departments. As demands for reform echo across the country, we examined the latest research and contacted experts to find the best methods for hiring police forces that better reflect the neighborhoods they serve.
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The City of Los Angeles Could Fund Your Big Idea

Because they’re frustrated with their jobs, cities’ employees are brimming with ideas. And as more cities are embracing civic innovation, Los Angeles is creating an in-house venture capital fund to do something about it.
Mayor Eric Garcetti recently announced the creation of a $1 million Innovation Fund for the city to invest in ideas hatched by city workers. The fund, backed by City Administrative Officer (CAO) Miguel Santana and the Innovation and Performance Commission (IPC), will be open throughout the year to city employees, who can submit ideas through the website innovate.lacity.org.

“We don’t think innovation should live in just one office,” says Abhi Nemani, the city’s chief data officer. “It should be democratized across the organization, across the city, and we should empower everybody to be able to say, ‘This doesn’t make sense, let me change this.’ And this is our big push in making that happen.”

The idea stems from several ongoing city projects that Mayor Garcetti liked, including an initiative to update paper maps to tablets in the sanitation department as well as a recreation and parks employee who designed a red button to turn off air conditioning systems at the end of the day, according to Nemani.

The city council, general managers, CAO and IPC will all be involved in reviewing submitted ideas, and criteria will be based on originality, potential for execution and enhancing efficiency and improving quality of life, Government Technology reports. The website will also feature selected projects and the status of each. There is no deadline and no maximum amount of projects the Innovation Fund will invest in, which leaves the door open to incredible opportunity.

Los Angeles’ fund follows the launch of GovTech Fund, a $23 million venture capital fund aimed at investing in companies that improve government technology, as well as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ recent “Shark Tank” model competition to spark ideas among its employees.

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The Controversial Way That an L.A. Suburb Is Helping the Homeless

Some of us might feel uneasy about handing money to a homeless person, but one Los Angeles suburb is trying out a new, slightly contentious approach.
The city of Pasadena will install 14 bright orange, smiley-faced parking meters that work just like regular parking meters with one exception: One hundred percent of the money collected in them will go to nonprofits that serve the homeless, the Los Angeles Times reports. The meters are a part of the Real Change Movement, that aims to raise awareness about homelessness as well as generate funds.
Officials say this program helps assure donors that their money will go directly to an organization fighting homelessness. “This is a clear alternative where people contributing know that all the money will go to effective services,” Pasadena’s housing director, Bill Huang, tells the newspaper.
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Others, however, have been skeptical, claiming that the meters are just a way to expel panhandlers. Local activist Paul Boden says, “If we would get serious about addressing the actual economic and social issues that we find so offputting, we wouldn’t need meters.”
As local homeless woman Holly Johnson says to the LA Times, “It’s a nice idea, but we don’t get that money,” adding that homeless organizations don’t necessarily fulfill the needs that are specific to her, such as a hotel room or medical attention.
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According to the Times report, the meter campaign cost $350,000, which was paid for by various grants and corporate sponsorships. No city money was used.
Other cities that have meter programs have varied success — Denver raised about $30,000 a year, but Orlando’s meters raised only $2,000 in three years. So far, the two meters in Pasadena have reportedly raised about $270 in three weeks.
Only time will tell if these parking meters can make real change.
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What Happens When a 13-Year-Old Girl Takes on an Oil Company?

Ever wonder what’s so bad about fracking?
The process — which is a nickname for hydraulic fracturing — involves a highly pressurized mix of water, chemicals and sand to release gas and oil from rock formations.
Fracking, which has caused drilling to spike across the country, is also accused of causing a variety of health and environmental problems, from creating millions of barrels of toxic waste a day to causing earthquakes, as well as polluting the air and our bodies.
Thirteen-year-old Nalleli Cobo from South Los Angeles is one of the many faces of fracking. Since 2010, she and her family have been living across the street from an AllenCo Energy Inc. facility in University Park, an urban oil-drilling site.
“The AllenCo oil site has gotten me sick,” she says in the slideshow below. “I have heart problems, I get nosebleeds frequently, I get headaches and I have stomach pain.” Her mother and grandmother (as well as others in the community) weren’t asthmatic until three years ago, around the same time the site opened. As Nalleli’s mother, Monic Uriate tells ABC7 last September, the fumes from the site were so noxious that she and her neighbors couldn’t even walk outside or open their windows.
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The family cannot simply move away from their home: “Unfortunately this community, we don’t have the economic position to move to another place so easy,” her mother says. The Los Angeles Times writes that their neighborhood, which is close to the University of Southern California, is home to low-income housing, day-care centers and schools.
That’s why Nalleli and her family joined a community effort called People Not Pozos (People Not Oil Wells) to permanently shut down the wells. Brave Nalleli, at the tender age of 12, was passing out flyers, speaking at press conferences and urging local leaders to close the site.
After 260 official complaints to air quality officials from residents over four years, a lawsuit was filed against the facility by the Los Angeles city attorney. An inspection from the EPA found that AllenCo did not meet recognized industry standards and practices of the Clean Air Act to prevent accidental air releases of hazardous substances, resulting in a $99,000 fine and a temporary shutdown of the University Park facility last November.  The company agreed to spend about $700,000 to make improvements.
With any luck, the shutdown will last much longer, and Nalleli and her neighbors can continue breathing air that has noticeably improved since the temporary closure of the oil fields. The Natural Resources Defense Council notes that in February, Los Angeles became the biggest city in the country to approve a moratorium on fracking, and city leaders will soon draft an ordinance zoning fracking and other harmful extraction methods out of city limits.
In the second video below, Nalleli asks the Pope to shut down the wells, which are owned by the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angles. (The English version starts at the 2-minute mark.)

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When Their Coworker Fell Ill, These Selfless Teachers Used a Little-Known Policy to Help Her Out

Our country’s hardworking teachers certainly deserve their vacations, but in the Los Angeles Unified School District, some educators decided to give up their days off to help a fellow coworker battle cancer.
Carol Clark, a much-loved sixth-grade elementary school teacher from Cudahy, Calif., was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. As ABC-7 reports, the 56-year-old quickly used up all her vacation days and the 120 sick days she had accumulated in her 17 years at Jaime Escalante Elementary School as she underwent chemotherapy and doctors visits. Due to her diagnosis, she missed all but two months of the school year.
“I lost pay, I lost my medical benefits,” she describes to the local television station. “I lost all that stuff.”
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Forced to miss more school for additional treatment, her husband Dave (who is also a teacher) decided to ask his coworkers for help by using a little-known Los Angeles plan called the Catastrophic Illness Donation program, the Los Angeles Times writes. The program allows teachers who have used up all their paid leave and are battling a severe illness to ask their fellow district employees to donate their own days off. Teachers can only use it once in their careers and must prove they are ill.
Although Dave was reluctant to ask his coworkers to donate their well-earned time off, it became necessary to do so. He left a sign-up sheet in the teachers’ lounge for anyone to donate up to 20 days and, incredibly, the community immediately rallied for one of their own.
Friends and even strangers across the whole school district stepped up and donated a total of 154 sick days — nearly an entire school year — to their colleague. According to the L.A. Times, one coworker who rarely spoke to Carol sacrificed 10 days.
“Carol has given a lot of love to a lot of people. She doesn’t realize it, but she has,” teacher Justine Gurrola tells ABC-7.
The Clarks were overwhelmed by the incredible generosity. With the donations, Carol was able to make up some of the pay she lost and even has extra sick days on reserve — should she need them.
“I was pretty blown away,” Carol, who returned to teaching this month, says. “It’s an indescribable feeling. It increases your faith in humanity.”
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Step Right Up, the Barber Will See You Now

When you think of a barbershop, images of men sitting around talking about sports, debating politics and discussing life probably comes to mind.
Besides the actual haircut, this social connection is why males, especially many African Americans, frequent barbershops.
Interestingly, starting in 2015, barbershops across Los Angeles will double as a doctor’s office. That’s right, patrons will sit down in the chair to receive a haircut and get a complementary blood pressure check to boot.
It’s all part of a study being conducted by Dr. Ronald Victor, the director of L.A.’s Cedars-Sinai Center for Hypertension, after he recently received an $8.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to research the impact of early barbershop intervention on high blood pressure in African-American males.
Unfortunately, high blood pressure is much more common among this demographic than any other group. Not only do they have a greater chance of contracting it at a younger age, but it’s also more likely that the problem will escalate, causing a stroke or heart disease.
Due to the lack of preventative care, the death rate of African-American males from hypertension is two times higher than in white males.
Which is why Victor and his partner, Los Angeles cardiologist Dr. Anthony Reid, are going to the heart of (pun intended) the African-American male community to solve the problem.
“Barbers are trusted peers,” Victor tells City Lab. “They have a lot of respect in their community, more than healthcare workers.”
Victor’s study is looking to expand on the research of an earlier study conducted in Dallas, where scientists studied the impact of barber intervention in 17 barbershops affecting 1,300 patrons during a 10-month-long period.
Now, Victor’s research will expand not only the knowledge gained, but the amount of participants. Lasting for at least 18 months, barbers will regularly check the blood pressure of their clients and refer them to physicians when needed.
This isn’t the first time doctors have tried to address this problem. Mobile clinics are found across inner cities and, oftentimes, clinics are set up in churches. However, most of the time, it’s mainly women and children attending them. But this time around, it’s just for the men.
In the end, Victor hopes that the comfy, reclining barbershop chair can help this become a scalable solution to a problem facing men nationwide.
So sit back, relax and get ready for the haircut that might just save your life.
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Are Storage Units the Key to Reducing Homelessness?

Anyone that has moved can attest to the difficulty of moving your possessions from one place to another. But for the homeless, not only is hauling around their stuff a physical challenge, but also a blow to any sense of stability or dignity.
This was poignantly illuminated in 2009 when a group of San Diego homeless lost everything while attending a church event when the Environmental Services Department collected and destroyed their belongings.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter of San Diego filed a lawsuit on behalf of the homeless shortly after, which led to the city’s solution to provide a place for those without homes to safely store their possessions.
The Transitional Storage Center now provides more than 350 bins — each providing up to 96 gallons of space — for the city’s homeless, according City Lab. The program, which is run by service group the Girls Think Tank, is supervised by two full-time employees, enabling individuals to store or check on their belongings during the morning and evening.
“When you’re literally homeless, you’re like a turtle that carries everything on his or her back,” says Michael Stoops, director of community organizing for the National Coalition for the Homeless. “Which can be problematic if you’re walking long distances or trying to work. There’s always the danger of things being lost, stolen, or thrown away by police officers.”
San Diego’s move follows in the footsteps of Los Angeles’s Central City East Association Check-in Center, which also provides storage units for homeless. While the concept is by no means a solution to ending homelessness, it can help people avoid living on the streets long-term.

“Having a storage space can help someone get out of homelessness,” Stoops tells City Lab. “A lot of shelters will have no storage space whatsoever. You sleep on top of your stuff, you put it under the cot, you have to take it with you the next day.”

Indeed, having a space to store belongings helps alleviate some of the stress on the homeless to carry their stuff in order to be mobile. Keepsakes and personal documents or sleeping bags and clothing can be cumbersome to tote around, making it difficult for the homeless to move around. That could mean missing a job interview or medical appointment or making frequent use of public washrooms.

Storage units — while simple in concept — do pose some challenges. Primarily, funding them can be tricky. San Diego’s operational costs are anywhere between $80,000 and $100,000 annually, City Lab reports. And finding a location isn’t easy, either. San Diego’s program has moved twice since the city agreed to the space in the lawsuit agreement, currently residing in a San Diego Housing Commission parking lot.

Supervising these facilities is also a problem, Stoops adds.

“If people have access to storage units at all hours of day and night, then you need video surveillance or security personnel” on site, according to Stoops. “You can’t be doing drugs, alcohol, prostitution [in a storage-unit building]. You need to think of all those things. You need to be clear about what items are allowed to be stored.”

Still, if more cities found ways to convert abandon lots or shipping containers into spaces for the homeless, perhaps it could help ease an already harrowing situation. Storage units may be a small step, but the concept could be a stable step in the right direction.

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