Transparency News, 8/26/20

 

The House Courts of Justice Committee will hear HB 5090 this afternoon. The bill seeks to provide access to criminal investigative files that are no longer active or ongoing. The committee meeting starts ~ 1 (30 minutes after House adjournment), but it's got a lot of bills to go through, so no real telling when 5090 will come up.

Watch here (select "now playing" on the left)

At least three Virginia universities have hired a fledgling New Orleans-based company on no-bid contracts to provide Covid-19 tests to students before allowing them to move into campus dorms, sparking criticism from some faculty members and students. The College of William & Mary, George Mason University, and Virginia Commonwealth University are among the institutions that contracted with Kallaco — which was incorporated less than four months ago — to handle testing. There’s one problem: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration confirmed to The Chronicle this week that Kallaco’s throat-swab test is not approved for at-home use. That means the FDA has approved the test’s use only when a medical professional collects the samples. That’s not what’s happening.  Kallaco’s no-bid contracts at the three institutions range in value, but collectively, the company stands to be paid more than $4 million for its testing suite of services and related software.
The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

The issue of how to report outbreaks exploded at UNC last week, with the four clusters contributing to 130 student Covid-19 cases in its then-weekly update of test results. The total spurred pushback from students and led the administration to shutter dorms, move all undergraduate classes online, and expand its data-sharing policies to daily reports and cluster-specific case counts. Other schools trying to open campuses are also grappling with how to collect and share data about the virus, raising questions among some students and faculty of where legal compliance ends and public relations begins. “Covid-19 didn’t create problems of transparency for universities,” said Donald Taylor Jr., a health policy professor at Duke University, which is also in North Carolina. “It just made them more public.” The legal wiggle room, coupled with varying appetites for transparency, is contributing to a patchwork of reporting standards among universities trying to return.
The Wall Street Journal

The Borough of Carlisle, Pa., could release more information about use of force by officers, or about the racial makeup of traffic stops. Or, it could not. As mundane as it sounds, the critical distinction surrounding recent discussions on police transparency is the old “can’t-versus-won’t” issue, according to government officials and activists. And there isn’t a unified sense of what is worth releasing or withholding. “The right thing to do is to create avenues to gather this information, even if the law doesn’t mandate it,” said Chris Burbank, vice president of Law Enforcement Strategy at the Center for Policing Equity, which advocates for better data collection in the justice system. With only 32 officers, Carlisle Police Chief Taro Landis said it’s not difficult for him to keep tabs on his staff, and questioned if broader use-of-force statistics would be valuable. “Any kind of statistics you put out can be misconstrued,” Landis said. “Why would we do that? Why would we look for another thing for people to look at us for, and justify what we do and don’t do, and criticize?” His fear, Landis said, is that any disparities in the use of force — particularly racial disparities — will be used to accuse individual officers of malice, rather than taking into account a wider variety of circumstances, particularly socio-economic factors. “Those are the things, in reality, we should be looking at, but we look at the low-hanging fruit,” said Landis, who is Black.
Governing

As South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster prepared to announce the end of a coronavirus stay-at-home order, his top staff received an email from the state health department. The message, highlighted in bold, was clear: Wait longer before allowing customers back inside restaurants, hair salons and other businesses where people will be in close contact. Instead, McMaster pressed ahead with a plan written by the state restaurant association to resume inside dining on May 11. The guidelines made masks optional for employees and allowed more customers inside than the health agency had advised. A few days later, the Republican governor opened the doors to salons, fitness centers and swimming pools. He did not wait to gauge the effect of the restaurant reopening on the virus, as public health officials had suggested. Like many states, South Carolina later experienced a surge in infections that forced McMaster to dial back his reopening plan. He was hardly alone. Thousands of pages of emails provided to The Associated Press under open-records laws show that governors across the U.S. were inundated with reopening advice from a wide range of industries — from campgrounds in New Hampshire to car washes in Washington. Some governors put economic interests ahead of public health guidance, and certain businesses were allowed to write the rules that would govern their own operations.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune