• Tag Archives Wisconsin

  • Suicides Up Nearly 100% Among Young People in Wisconsin’s Second Largest County, as Medical Experts Cite Perils of Social Isolation

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    This summer, a relative reached out to me regarding the sad story of Kodie Dutcher, a 10-year-old from Baraboo, Wisconsin who was reported missing in July.

    Law enforcement officials put out an Amber Alert, and a volunteer search party was organized. Kodie’s body was found the following morning—July 7, a Tuesday—near her home. Her death was ruled a suicide by the Baraboo Police Department.

    Kodie’s death shook me. I grew up in a small town not far from Baraboo and know people who live there today. It occurred to me that my own little girl, whom I still think of as a baby, is roughly the same age Kodie was when she took her life.

    The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge for everyone, but evidence suggests that few demographics are suffering more than young people. Data show they’re suffering more economically, and emerging evidence shows that many are less equipped to deal with the “collateral damage” of forced lockdowns mentally.

    A new report from the Wisconsin State Journal examining mental health trends in Dane County, the second most populous county in Wisconsin, shows that many are struggling to cope with the mental toll of social isolation precipitated by the economic lockdowns.

    Hannah Flanagan, the Director of Emergency Services at Journey Mental Health Center, said calls to the center’s crisis hotline are up more than 15 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, with many people suffering not from severe mental illness but situational stress. Preliminary data collected by the center show that Dane County passed its 2019 suicide count in early October.

    Flanagan said Dane County had experienced 57 suicides as of early October, more than the total of 54 it had experienced the entire calendar year in 2019. She indicated that the excess deaths largely stem from stay-at-home orders.

    “When people are lonely, it’s really hard to cope,” Flanagan said. “The specificity about COVID social distancing and isolation that we’ve come across as contributing factors to the suicides are really new to us this year.”

    It’s alarming to see a large county eclipse its previous suicide total with nearly three months remaining in the calendar year, but the numbers become even more troubling when you drill into them a little further. The center’s figures show that 15 of these suicides were committed by people under the age of 25. That’s nearly double the total in 2019 (eight)—and we still have nearly three months until the year is over.

    One could dismiss these figures as anecdotal evidence or a strange outlier. The problem is it fits with other mental health trends around the country. The CDC recently reported that one out of four young people have contemplated suicide during the pandemic, about two and a half times the overall rate.

    Though national data on youth suicide during the pandemic is not yet available, trends reported from suicide hotline centers across the country show that many young people are crying out for help.

    Flanagan’s explanation that the spike in suicide in Dane County is tied to COVID-19 lockdowns dovetails with years of science that shows social isolation isn’t just psychologically harmful to humans, but deadly.

    An abundance of scientific evidence shows social isolation “is one of the main risk factors associated with suicidal outcomes.” The dangers are particularly acute in women, research suggests.

    This is why from the beginning of the pandemic there has been a small but consistent chorus of researchers warning that forced isolation could prove to be “a perfect storm” for suicide.

    “Secondary consequences of social distancing may increase the risk of suicide,” researchers wrote in an April 10 paper published by the American Medical Association. “It is important to consider changes in a variety of economic, psycho-social, and health-associated risk factors.”

    It should be noted that suicide is just one of the deadly effects of social isolation. Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and assistant professor of healthcare policy at Weill Cornell Medical College, detailed numerous other deadly effects of social isolation in a popular 2016 article in the New York Times:

    “A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us. Individuals with less social connection have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, more inflammation and higher levels of stress hormones. One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent.

    Another analysis that pooled data from 70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age.

    Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.”

    Unfortunately, nations around the world and many US states have failed to assess these risks. Policymakers, perhaps incentivized by a 24-hour media that tracked and reported COVID-19 deaths like a sporting event, have adopted empty slogans such as “if it saves just one life.”

    It rarely occurs to lawmakers to also look at the lives lost as a result of their policies.

    “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs,” the famous economist Thomas Sowell once observed, “and you try to get the best trade-off you can get, that’s all you can hope for.”

    Tradeoffs are a simple economic reality, but one humans often overlook. The idea was perhaps best described by economist Russ Roberts, who noted that every choice also means giving something up.

    In many ways, the pandemic is a perfect example of ignoring the reality of tradeoffs. Lawmakers saw that by enforcing social distancing, they were (in theory) limiting the spread of the virus. What they didn’t see was the tradeoffs: lost social interaction that is crucial for humans, cancer screenings abandoned, jobs lost, AA meetings canceled, babies denied heart surgery, and so on.

    As economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan noted early in the pandemic, across the country we saw the leaders of America’s institutions—county councils to mayors to school boards to police to clergy—simply ignore the realities of tradeoffs:

    “Rational people understand this isn’t how the world works. Regardless of whether we acknowledge them, tradeoffs exist. And acknowledging tradeoffs is an important part of constructing sound policy. Unfortunately, even mentioning tradeoffs in a time of crisis brings the accusation that only heartless beasts would balance human lives against dollars. But each one of us balances human lives against dollars, and any number of other things, every day.”

    Americans, particularly those with influence and those in leadership positions, should recognize that lockdowns—and indeed all sweeping government-mandates—come with a host of unintended consequences.

    The failure to acknowledge or adequately consider them is why so many people today are in pain—and why more young Americans are seeking to throw away their most precious gift.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • EFF and ACLU Expose Government’s Secret Stingray Use in Wisconsin Case

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Thanks to EFF and the ACLU, the government has finally admitted it secretly used a Stingray to locate a defendant in a Wisconsin criminal case, United States v. Damian Patrick. Amazingly, the government didn’t disclose this fact to the defendant—or the court—until we raised it in an amicus brief we filed in the case. In the government’s brief, filed late last week, it not only fails to acknowledge the impact of hiding this fact from the defendant but also claims its warrantless real-time location tracking didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment.

    We first learned about this case when it was already on appeal to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and filed an amicus brief arguing the Fourth Amendment protects all of us from warrantless, real-time location tracking. The government suggested to both Patrick and the trial court that it had relied on location information obtained directly from Sprint. However, we suspected they had instead used a Stingray.

    Stingrays Allow Indiscriminate Dragnet Searches of All Cell Phones in an Area

    Stingrays, otherwise known as cell-site simulators, act as a fake cell-phone tower. They can be small enough to fit in a car and allow the government to direct all cell phones in the area to connect to it instead of the real tower. In doing so, the government can get a very precise picture of exactly where those phones are located—much more precise than many other types of location tracking technologies.

    Stingrays are especially pernicious surveillance tools because they collect information on every single phone in a given area—not just the suspect’s phone—this means they allow the police to conduct indiscriminate, dragnet searches—in some cases on up to 10,000 phones at one time. They are also able to locate people inside traditionally-protected private spaces like homes, doctors’ offices, or places of worship and can be configured to capture the content of communications.

    The Milwaukee Police Department Tried to Hide its Use of a Stingray

    In this case, the police first told Patrick they’d relied on “information obtained from an anonymous source” to find him sitting in the passenger seat of a car parked in an alley in Milwaukee.  It wasn’t until six months after his arrest that they revealed they’d tracked him through his cell phone, and even then they implied they’d gotten location information directly from the cell phone service provider. The government never got a search warrant to use any kind of technology to find Patrick in real time.

    As we’ve seen in other cases involving Stingrays, the government did everything it could in this case to hide the fact that it used a Stingray—from the court that issued the pen register/trap and trace order, the court that heard Patrick’s motion to suppress the evidence, and even from Patrick, himself. In police reports, the officers said only that they “‘obtained information’ of Patrick’s location; . . . had ‘prior knowledge’ that Patrick was occupying the vehicle; . . . [and] ‘obtained information from an unknown source’ that Patrick was inside the vehicle at that location.” And even at an evidentiary hearing where officers admitted to cellphone tracking, they would only acknowledge, cryptically, that they’d received “electronic information” confirming Patrick was in the vehicle. When Patrick’s attorney asked what “electronic information” meant, the officer on the stand would say only that it involved “tracking [a] cell phone.” The judge cut off any further questioning at that point.

    Luckily, in our amicus brief we were able to point the court to Milwaukee Police Department logs showing the police had used a Stingray on the very same day Patrick was arrested, under strikingly similar circumstances.[1] We also directed the court to a non-disclosure agreement, which the Milwaukee police signed just months before Patrick was arrested. In this standard FBI-issued NDA, signed by many other state and local agencies across the country, the police department agreed not to tell anyone (even the judge) in any civil or criminal proceeding that it had used a Stingray. It also agreed to dismiss any case—at the FBI’s request—if the court tried to force it to reveal anything about the device.

    Once we presented these facts to the appellate court, the government finally admitted it used a Stingray but would not concede this should have any impact on the legal analysis in this case. In a footnote to the brief the government filed last week, it even appeared to blame Patrick for failing to raise this at the trial court.

    The Government Admits it Needs a Probable Cause Warrant to Conduct Real-Time Location Tracking

    Interestingly, even though the government doesn’t think it’s secret use of a Stingray impacts this case, it admits that using technology to track someone’s location in real time (whether through location information obtained from the phone company or by using a Stingray) is a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes. It also admits it needs probable cause and a search warrant to legally execute such a search. This appears to be the first time the government has admitted these things in an appellate case.

    But the government also argues it didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment in this case because it actually got a warrant—or maybe, in the alternative, the equivalent of a warrant (the police had a warrant to arrest (not search) Patrick and a court order (not a search warrant) to track Patrick’s phone). In a confusing and somewhat circular argument, the government asserts that because it submitted a “sworn affidavit” in support of its request for the pen/trap order, the order must have actually been a search warrant—if it hadn’t been a warrant, then it “wouldn’t have needed a finding of probable cause, which it contained.”

    The Seventh Circuit Should Follow Maryland and Find Secret, Warrantless Stingray Use Unconstitutional

    It’s now up to the Seventh Circuit to try to make sense of this argument (or maybe just to send the case back to the trial court for a new trial). If the appellate court decides to take this issue on, we hope it follows a recent Maryland appellate decision, State of Maryland v. Andrews(another case where we were amicus), where the court held unanimously that the Baltimore Police Department’s very similar secretive behavior and failure to get a search warrant before using a Stingray violated the defendant’s constitutional rights. Andrews is the first appellate decision that we know of where a court has ever looked at police use of a Stingray. We hope it sets a very persuasive precedent to all courts that secret, warrantless Stingray use violates the Fourth Amendment.

    Source: EFF and ACLU Expose Government’s Secret Stingray Use in Wisconsin Case | Electronic Frontier Foundation


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  • Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘I Thought It Was a Home Invasion’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off.

    The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house, making a mess, and — according to Cindy — leaving her “dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor in a most disrespectful way.”

    Then they left, carrying with them only a cellphone and a laptop.

    That was the first thought of “Anne” (not her real name). Someone was pounding at her front door. It was early in the morning — very early — and it was the kind of heavy pounding that meant someone was either fleeing from — or bringing — trouble.

    “It was so hard. I’d never heard anything like it. I thought someone was dying outside.”

    She ran to the door, opened it, and then chaos. “People came pouring in. For a second I thought it was a home invasion. It was terrifying. They were yelling and running, into every room in the house. One of the men was in my face, yelling at me over and over and over.”

    It was indeed a home invasion, but the people who were pouring in were Wisconsin law-enforcement officers. Armed, uniformed police swarmed into the house. Plainclothes investigators cornered her and her newly awakened family. Soon, state officials were seizing the family’s personal property, including each person’s computer and smartphone, filled with the most intimate family information.

    Why were the police at Anne’s home? She had no answers. The police were treating them the way they’d seen police treat drug dealers on television.

    In fact, TV or movies were their only points of reference, because they weren’t criminals. They were law-abiding. They didn’t buy or sell drugs. They weren’t violent. They weren’t a danger to anyone. Yet there were cops — surrounding their house on the outside, swarming the house on the inside. They even taunted the family as if they were mere “perps.”

    As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren’t enough, next came ominous warnings. Don’t call your lawyer. Don’t tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends.

    The entire neighborhood could see the police around their house, but they had to remain silent. This was not the “right to remain silent” as uttered by every cop on every legal drama on television — the right against self-incrimination. They couldn’t mount a public defense if they wanted — or even offer an explanation to family and friends.

    Yet no one in this family was a “perp.” Instead, like Cindy, they were American citizens guilty of nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights to support Act 10 and other conservative causes in Wisconsin.

    via Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘I Thought It Was a Home Invasion’.


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