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GhostOnTheHalfShell (@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai)

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sarcozona
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Is a photo subversive? NSF staff overcome obstacles to 75th anniversary portrait | Science | AAAS

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Hundreds of National Science Foundation staffers turned out this week for a group photograph to celebrate the besieged agency’s 75th anniversary—despite efforts by NSF officials to prevent the picture from being taken.

The unsanctioned 20 May event was not a protest against the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration, which has terminated $1.5 billion in NSF grants, pushed out scores of workers, and proposed deep cuts to the agency’s budget. The only signs on display presented the number “75” and an NSF logo. “We just wanted to show our appreciation for all the advances in science that NSF has funded over the years,” says an organizer, a program manager who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution.

But NSF officials apparently saw it differently. “This is not an agency-supported event and we can’t provide any resources,” a senior manager in the office of the NSF director emailed organizers after initially providing the name of an NSF photographer.

Undeterred, the organizers found an amateur photographer within their ranks and invited staff to gather on the ground-level patio outside NSF headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, so the agency’s name and logo could appear in the background of the group picture. Everyone was welcome, according to organizers, although they say senior administrators were told not to participate.

But NSF wasn’t done trying to shut down the photo shoot. “Management cannot guarantee the structural integrity of the concrete slab” at the building’s entrance, the agency told organizers, citing the fact it sits on top of an underground parking garage.

So the staging area was moved to a public space on the west side of the building. “It’s probably just as well,” one organizer says, “because we probably wouldn’t have all fit on the patio.”

Assembling on their lunch break, more than 250 staffers took advantage of a sunny spring day to express their high regard for an agency facing an uncertain future. “It’s really frustrating,” one participant says. “Most of the anniversary events have been canceled. But we didn’t want to let it pass without saying how much NSF has meant to all of us.”

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sarcozona
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ICE Arrests Mississippi Father at His Citizenship Hearing

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One morning, sitting in an immigration office in Memphis, Kasper Eriksen found himself transformed. Only a day before, he was a welding foreman, a husband and father of four who lived on a family farm in Sturgis, Mississippi. Now, he was a detainee, bound and shackled to the sterile white seats of a detention shuttle in Tennessee, headed southwest, barely able to wriggle.

It was here, late on April 15, with chains around his belly, hands and ankles, that the Denmark-born man fully realized that what he was experiencing was not a brief disruption from his many years in America—some clerical error that could be unmade in an afternoon’s discussion, or with the swift intervention of a judge.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement transported Kasper to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, also known as the LaSalle Detention Center, in Jena, Louisiana, with a dozen other detainees. Not sons, not fathers, not husbands, but detainees, “aliens”: in the eyes of the law, that remains his primary designation. ICE deposited him in a facility where he shares a cell with just under 100 other people, cycling in and out, sharing little in common beyond the uncertainty of their future.

Kasper has never been charged with or convicted of any crime. He has not been accused of being a member of MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. What led the government to rip Kasper out of the arms of his family was, to the best of his knowledge, a single document. Form I-751, appropriately clinical, a “Petition to Remove Conditions on Residence,” was just one of the endless documents he needed on his decade-plus journey to American citizenship.

Kasper and his wife, Savannah Hobart Eriksen, never submitted that form, which was due all the way back in 2015. She had suffered a stillbirth, losing their first child, and in the days of grief that followed, the deadline slipped right past them. But Kasper’s naturalization continued unimpeded. He corresponded with immigration officials numerous times over the next 10 years, and says agents never warned him that a critical document was missing. He paid taxes each year, reliably contributing a portion of his labor to the nation he already felt a part of.

Together with Savannah, they had four more children. He became a foreman at his job, and as 2025 arrived, he prepared for the final meeting with immigration services to formalize his naturalization and become an American citizen after spending nearly half of his life building a family here.

Savannah left that meeting alone. Kasper’s understanding is that his failure to submit I-751 led to a removal order—one immigration services issued without successfully notifying the Eriksens in 2019. That was 10 years after his first arrival in the U.S., four years after their miscarriage, and six years before he was chained to a seat on a bus in Memphis. 

More than a month has passed since Savannah last saw Kasper, as ICE took him away in Tennessee. She doesn’t know when he will be either released or deported, doesn’t know if their lives will be uprooted to Denmark, his birth country. She is six months pregnant with their fifth child, due in August, and even now she doesn’t know if he will be there when she gives birth.

Kasper Eriksen spoke to the Mississippi Free Press from the LaSalle Detention Center on the morning of May 20, confirming first that he was safe and not experiencing any of the abuse reported in some ICE facilities elsewhere in Louisiana. In his experience, the GEO Group-run detention center’s food is palatable, the staff is professional, and the medical care is attentive.

He spends most of his day in a wide cell, housing upwards of 90 other detained immigrants at a time. He gets a couple of hours of yard time each day, a routine pleasure he says is critical to his sanity. Even so, Kasper has already lost about 25 pounds during his detention.

In his time at LaSalle, he has met other detainees from other walks of life. Some are young men, even teenagers. Some are much older, like one immigrant frail enough to be confined to a wheelchair. “ It’s all different stuff. Some people have an expired visa, for some, it’s a minor or larger crime. I would say that some of these people (are victims) of miscommunication,” Kasper said.

He, like many others in detention across the United States today, falls into that latter category. Austin Kocher, assistant professor at Syracuse University and a researcher of America’s immigration system, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 5 interview that stories just like Kasper Eriksen’s were growing significantly under the Trump regime.

“ ICE detention has grown dramatically. It’s up to about 48,000 people in detention. And that’s up from under 30,000 at the end of the Biden administration,” Kocher said. That number is not cumulative—it ebbs and flows as the government deports people. “With an almost 20,000-person growth, that definitely represents a lot more arrests.”

Private prison companies like the GEO Group, which operates the LaSalle facility where Kasper has been since March, are handling most of the increase. The GEO Group owns or operates 28 immigrant detention facilities across the U.S., and its corporate PAC was the first to max out its donations to the Trump campaign in 2024, Citizens for Ethics reported last year. After Trump’s victory last November, stocks soared for the GEO Group and another private prison operator, CoreCivic.  

“The group that has been growing the most is immigrants with no criminal charges and no criminal conviction,” Kocher said. “The government’s narrative that they’re targeting criminals is not bulletproof. They’re picking up a lot of people who don’t have any criminal history at all.”

In Kocher’s analysis, since January, detentions of immigrants with no convictions or charges have had a relative growth three times greater than those of convicted criminals—the consequence of the cold logic that the easiest place to find immigrants to detain is at scheduled meetings.

“The  easiest way, logistically, is just go after people who are following the rules. They’re the easiest to just snatch up when they come into the office,” Kocher said.

This was Kasper’s story. Until his detention, he had expected the appointment in Memphis to be the final step before his naturalization. Over the last year, the messages he received from their immigration portal seemed encouraging. “We are actively reviewing your Form N-400, Application for Naturalization,” a message on Sept. 12, 2024, read. “Our records showed nothing is outstanding at this time.”

Then, on March 7 of this year, “We scheduled an interview for your Form N-400, Application for Naturalization.” The meeting was only one month away.

Two hours after the Eriksens arrived at the office in Memphis, awaiting an early morning appointment with a case manager, the trap sprang. A law enforcement officer, whom Kasper recalled being a U.S. Marshal, was waiting for them when the meeting began.

The first stage was disbelief. Even the men who were about to collapse the Eriksens’s lives seemed mortified at the circumstances.

“I will say, the case manager in Memphis and the U.S. Marshal (had) a real sense of remorse because they realized it was an unfortunate circumstance,” Kasper said.

The case manager insisted that he had done what he could—the reason for the two-hour wait—to resolve this simple matter of paperwork.

“He said his hands were currently tied,” Kasper said. “He told us that, had it been a couple of months earlier, during the previous administration, the situation would have probably been different. With the new administration,” the official told him, “things have changed a lot, so they had to treat me like they were going to.”

ICE whisked him away to a holding facility in Memphis. And that was it. Both of the Eriksens, still in the early stages of denial, had no notion that this was the beginning of an odyssey.

“We’re still thinking this is one of those situations, like, where he got picked up and now we’re going down to court to bond him out and go home,” Savannah told the Mississippi Free Press on May 20. “Like it was a DUI or something.”

He was gone before the heartbreak set in. “We didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she said.

Kasper and Savannah met at 16, during Kasper’s study abroad at Starkville High School. They fell in love quickly and stayed in contact after he returned to Denmark. A few years later, he was back for good.

Those who know Kasper Eriksen describe him as a man of commitment. To hear Savannah describe him, he is an unerring provider and companion, the love of her life. His other connections are practically as inspired.

Justin Lindley, Kasper’s boss at The Welding Works, a metal fabricator, describes his work ethic with a sense of pride usually reserved for family. Kasper came to work for him in 2014, building the business up to its current success. Lindley’s life, in its own way, has been thrown into chaos by Kasper’s detention and possible deportation. He had just sketched out a retirement plan: by 2028, he would step back and leave the venture to Kasper.

“No one else is capable of taking it on like him,” Lindley told the Mississippi Free Press.

It’s unclear what awaits Kasper in the future. Already, the damage to his family is incalculable. Kasper is the Eriksens’ sole breadwinner; Savannah has more than a full-time job raising and homeschooling four children.

Even as a family fortunate enough to have the resources to fight, the drain on their finances is immense. Savannah estimated tens of thousands of dollars in fees and payments already. The family has started a GoFundMe to offset the extraordinary cost, raising over $18,000 so far. 

But while the Eriksen family suffers, the private prison industry profits. Simply staying in close contact with Kasper during his detention at the facility in Louisiana costs the family hundreds of dollars per week alone, Savannah says. (In a May 21 statement, GEO Group Spokesperson Christopher V. Ferreira told the Mississippi Free Press that third-party vendors provide telecommunication services at GEO Group-contracted ICE detention facilities under a contract with ICE; those vendors set the rates, not GEO Group).

For Savannah, the hardest part of her family’s ordeal has been the slow acknowledgment to their young children that their father may not be coming home any time soon. Their children include an 8-year-old, a 6-year-old, a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old, with an infant on the way. The Eriksens are no good at lying to their children, so they couched Kasper’s detention with rapidly unraveling positivity.

“In the early days, we kept it vague. We just said, ‘Daddy has to stay for some more paperwork,’” Savannah said. “As it dragged out, we’ve let them in on a little bit more about what’s going on. First, they thought he was in a hotel. Now, (they realize) he’s probably not at a hotel. Or it’s the most horrible hotel they could have ever imagined.”

Though stories like Kasper Eriksen’s may make up a significant portion of new growth in detentions, they bear little resemblance to the horror stories of criminal invaders that the Trump administration has pushed to justify its crackdown on immigrants.

Nathalia Rocha Dickson, an immigration attorney in Louisiana, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 6 interview that violent, criminal narratives are increasingly employed to justify a crackdown on all immigrants, the majority of whom have done nothing wrong.

“The government is more interested in feeding into rhetoric—these ugly stories about immigration. We’re feeding a monster for an administration that is not really concerned about the rule of law,” she said.

Dickson has represented clients in detention and deportation for eight years now. What strikes her most about the new deportation regime is how arbitrarily it operates. “It’s totally random. This is the stupidity of it,” she said. “There’s no way for you to determine who’s gonna be picked up and who’s not. You may show up for a scheduled hearing and get picked up. You may be driving and get pulled over. It’s really, really crazy right now.”

Kasper’s native tongue is getting rusty. He has little cause to practice it in Sturgis, Mississippi. Down at LaSalle, he had a chance encounter with an ancestral neighbor—a German-American living in Oklahoma, 71 years old, facing deportation to a country he hadn’t seen in decades. Kasper reached out to him in German, only to receive a bewildered stare back. The man had been American for so long, he’d forgotten his native tongue.

Dickson personally knows of a case in which the government attempted to swiftly deport a family of three who were waiting for ongoing appeals in an asylum case. In that case, she was able to legally intervene and get the family out on bond before the government could deport them.

“ Why would you detain someone who has zero criminal history whatsoever and has a pending case?” she asked. “ I could see the judge’s frustration. They asked, ‘What are you doing here? Why did y’all do this?’ And the ICE attorney is simply like, ‘Well, we don’t make the decisions when it comes to that. We just show up for court.’”

“That’s the thing about this administration. They don’t care. They don’t care if it’s legal or not. It just doesn’t matter anymore,” Dickson continued.

The Mississippi Free Press contacted both U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services for this story, which was published after Christopher Harress first reported on it in The Mississippi Independent on May 15, followed by Emily Wagster Pettus at Mississippi Today on May 20.

Lindsay Williams, a spokesperson for ICE representing Mississippi and other southern states, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 21 interview that ICE had little to do with the evolution of the long, confusing saga that began with a missing document and led to an order to arrest and deport Kasper Eriksen. USCIS, Williams explained, handles the entire process, only involving ICE to effect a removal.

“All I know is that once there’s a final (removal) order issued, and we get it, then you go on the list of folks who have a final order. Then, that’s our part of it. To arrest and detain and remove,” Williams said.

But what to make of the messages the Eriksens relayed to the Mississippi Free Press that they said they received from the case manager at their naturalization hearing? This reporter asked Williams what had changed, over a matter of months, that made this paperwork error unresolvable without the shackling and detention of a prospective citizen who had so willingly cooperated with the system.

“Well, I don’t know how negotiable a final order (of removal) has ever been,” Williams replied. Still, he acknowledged, mistakes were possible.  ”We’re all fallible. There have probably, in the history of (deportations), been people who have received final orders or judgments that were incorrect, or that we have since corrected.”

Still, the new administration has not been inclined to err on the side of caution to avoid such errors.

“The president and the administration have been pretty clear about increased immigration enforcement,” Williams said. “If this person has a final order—meaning that they’ve exhausted their due process and all legal means to stay here—we are gonna effect that arrest and removal. The president’s been super clear about this. So that’s what has changed. This is the direction that we’re (going) in.” 

Williams also responded to Kocher’s research finding that, contrary to the Trump administration’s focus on the most extreme criminality among immigrants, the new detentions were resulting in a much more significant portion of detained immigrants with no criminal convictions or charges.

“Sure,” Williams responded. “ You would see that if we’re out in the community looking for the violent people. If we encounter … other people who are here without status, regardless of their criminality, they’re arrested as well. You can see how quickly that non-criminal population can grow just because they’re encountered.”

Shortly before press time, USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser provided a statement to the Mississippi Free Press in response to inquiries about Kasper Eriksen’s case.

“It is the responsibility of conditional residents of the United States to apply to have those conditions removed before their Green Card expires—allowing them to obtain their permanent residence and ultimately citizenship,” Tragesser wrote. “This is a long-standing requirement set by law, and ignoring it can have severe consequences, including removal from the country.”

USCIS declined to comment on any specifics, including the 10-year gap between the missed document and Kasper’s detainment.

While mass deportations are what the administration has prioritized, arrests alone, Austin Kocher explained, are one of the few metrics actually growing.

“ICE detention is up. ICE deportations are not up, oddly enough,” he said.

Hard data and a unifying theory to explain it all are difficult to come by, but an inevitable reality is that mass detentions have encountered the simple rule of law. 

“The administration can say what they want, but there are logistical barriers (to deportation), from due process to simply getting enough planes in the air. They’re seeing a lot more challenges, and part of the problem is that they don’t want to admit that to their supporters,” Kocher said.

Lindsay Williams at ICE acknowledged his point, but said that the deportations would spike in due time.

“On a base  level, it’s much easier to arrest people than it is to go through the legal process to remove them,” he said. “We can always add more people into detention off the streets, right? That’s easy. So those numbers have increased dramatically. It’s much harder and it’s a longer process to complete the immigration proceedings. You have to have your day in court. You will see deportations increase as we have more facilities, more vans, planes, trains, buses, people—that’s a slower build.”

Mass deportations, of course, are a bipartisan affair.

“ The Biden administration deported over a quarter of a million people last year. That was the highest in 10 years,” Kocher said.

But he added that the Trump administration is going far beyond the already dramatic exercise of immigration authority seen in the past four years.

“They’re  using all kinds of mechanisms that are very questionable in terms of their lawfulness, whether that’s the Alien Enemies Act, or making claims about a relatively unheard of gang being classified as a terrorist group, then making claims about people’s affiliation with that gang that are spurious at best.”

The Trump administration used vague insinuations of possible gang affiliations in March to justify sending 238 Venezuelan men, many without criminal records or proof of any gang affiliation, to an infamous prison in El Salvador without due process—and despite a judge’s order halting the deportations.

The administration has also revoked visas from and arrested pro-Palestinian college students for engaging in protests or writing op-eds. That includes Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, whom ICE arrested in New York and transported to the same Jena, Louisiana, facility where Kasper Eriksen now resides.

At home in Mississippi, the burden of a family farm and a home full of children would have been unbearable for Savannah Eriksen to shoulder alone. But the Eriksens have not been alone. Friends, family, and the entire community of Sturgis have been of constant service, feeding and caring for their children, and keeping the farm alive, all while Savannah fights to free her husband.

“Everyone is stepping up to serve one another and love one another,” Savannah said.

Kasper can scarcely put into words what that means to him. “It’s relief,” he said simply. “It makes me feel relieved.”

On reflection, it occurs to the Eriksens just how common their story is. One story, one man in a detention center, held among thousands of others whom ICE pulled from their communities or separated from their families. Most of their stories will never be told. Few will have the intervention of their communities or the media.

Late Tuesday, Kasper received the first real news since his detention: a preliminary hearing is set for next week, May 27. For now, all that’s left to the Eriksens is an anxious hope that all of this can be undone.

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acdha
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“More than a month has passed since Savannah last saw Kasper, as ICE took him away in Tennessee. She doesn’t know when he will be either released or deported, doesn’t know if their lives will be uprooted to Denmark, his birth country. She is six months pregnant with their fifth child, due in August, and even now she doesn’t know if he will be there when she gives birth.”
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sarcozona
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LeMadChef
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Cruelty is the point!
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AI power and water use is through the roof, and 80–90% is per query

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There’s been a lot of discourse lately from AI boosters making excuses for AI’s ghastly power consumption. The reason you’re seeing these excuses now is because even the mainstream media is writing up how the AI industry’s power and water use is horrifying.

Quite often these are literally old excuses for bitcoin mining’s power consumption — which I covered at length over on the Attack Of the 50 Foot Blockchain blog — but with the buzzword changed for their (ahem) pivot to AI.

The AI fans frequently claim you just can’t work out the marginal cost of one query. Because there’s other things in the system using power and that means you, uh, can’t do arithmetic.

Back in the real world, it’s normal to account actions for their share of the total system. Divide number of queries or bitcoin transactions by the total terrible energy use. That’s absolutely standard.

The common excuse is to say that the AI industry mostly uses energy training the models, and each query hardly adds anything by comparison. This appears to be entirely false: [MIT Tech Review]

As conversations with experts and AI companies made clear, inference, not training, represents an increasing majority of AI’s energy demands and will continue to do so in the near future. It’s now estimated that 80–90% of computing power for AI is used for inference.

That 80–90% doesn’t have a calculation set out in the article, so the number appears to be from the experts they spoke to.

But the bottom line is: each individual query you make to ChatGPT really does pump out more carbon.

Another claim is that AI data centres don’t use lots of water. Which they very much do: [Bloomberg, archive]

Two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress. While these facilities are popping up all over the country, five states alone account for 72% of the new centers in high-stress areas.”

Our good friend Alex de Vries-Gao writes a site called Digiconomist. He’s covered cryptocurrency power use closely for several years. He started looking at the new AI bubble in 2023 and worked out that AI would beat bitcoin’s power use by 2027, if all the numbers kept going up as they were. [blog post, 2023; Joule, 2023, archive]

But AI’s actually gone way faster than that. De Vries-Gao has a new paper in Joule: [blog post; Joule]

AI systems were responsible for up to 20% of global data center power demand by the end of last year. Moreover, this share could approach half of data center power demand by the end of this year, as the power demand of AI systems could rise to 23 gigawatts. This exceeds the current power demand of cryptocurrency mining and is equivalent to twice the power needed to keep my home country the Netherlands running.

Alex had to work to extract these numbers. The AI vendors do not release numbers on their power use. They obfuscate the numbers as hard as they possibly can. Because the numbers are really bad!

And of course it’s not just the carbon dioxide from the electricity they’re using. There’s even more carbon from manufacturing the chips and building the data centres.

The AI bubble isn’t a case of “don’t like it, don’t use it.” It’s a systemic problem. These bozos do not care that they are working together to set the world on fire, they just have to keep the money flowing a bit longer.

You should expect more and more elaborate excuses from the AI boosters. And they’ll probably keep stealing the excuses from bitcoin.

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sarcozona
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These numbers aren’t really useful for an individual user given that we don’t know what doing the tasks *without* AI would cost.
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mkalus
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UDC Police Chief Carlos Kelly Was Fired After He Tried to Report Time Theft

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Carlos Kelly’s relatively brief tenure as chief of the University of the District of Columbia’s police department was rocky, to say the least.

In less than a year as UDC’s top cop, he rearranged the schedule to avoid the need for overtime shifts, eliminated a contract for extra campus security, and rooted out alleged time theft among the ranks, saving the university about $1 million in the past year, by his own estimates.

He investigated multiple officers for misconduct—issuing discipline and, in the worst cases, terminations. Other problematic officers resigned in lieu of termination, he says. 

The reforms he implemented did not sit well with at least some of the force. Multiple officers filed complaints against Kelly and circulated a dossier seeking to discredit his credentials, education, and work history. One of his subordinates, a lieutenant who was later fired, was secretly recorded saying about Kelly, “If I see that n—r on the street, I’m going to punch him in the mouth,” Kelly says.

But when Kelly showed up to UDC’s annual oversight hearing in March to testify in front of the D.C. Council concerning the corruption he’d uncovered, much of his focus was on the university’s chief operating officer, David Franklin, who happened to be sitting behind him in the hearing room that day.

“The cover-up is worse than the crime,” Kelly said. 

He described how he had uncovered evidence that a sergeant had been stealing time from the university and that he notified Franklin of his intention to take the information to the Office of the Inspector General. Franklin instructed him to wait until the two had a chance to talk about it in person, Kelly says, but then Franklin “canceled every single solitary meeting” for the next four and a half months.

As he grew more and more frustrated, Kelly requested a meeting with UDC President Maurice Edington

“The day I was supposed to meet with the president,” Kelly testified, “I was terminated.”

***

Kelly was hired as police chief and director of public safety in March of 2024. He wasn’t officially sworn in until last May, and by February of this year, he was fired without a specific explanation.

Along with his testimony in front of Council Chair Phil Mendelson’s Committee of the Whole, Kelly wrote a summary of the alleged time theft, workplace misconduct, and corruption that he uncovered during his brief tenure at UDC.

The 13-page document, which was also submitted to the Council, describes how some entrenched officers bullied and berated subordinates, manipulated the shift schedule for their own benefit, and bucked at his attempts to reform the department.

In the document and in his testimony, Kelly focuses in particular on Sgt. Scott Thompson, who last year earned nearly $57,000 in overtime—the most of any UDC employee, according to information the university provided to the Council. Ten of the top 15 overtime earners at UDC were police officers in fiscal year 2024, according to the university; they were paid a total of $252,962 in overtime.

Kelly sought to address the issue by switching to 12-hours shifts, which “significantly reduced reliance on overtime and improved scheduling fairness,” Kelly writes in the document he gave to the Council.

But two lieutenants who were put in charge of creating the schedule circumvented Kelly’s reform “by creating a specialized position for Sgt. Scott Thompson, allowing him to continue working 8-hour shifts while being disproportionately assigned overtime,” Kelly continues. “Despite the lack of actual need for these additional hours, they continued to manipulate the system for personal gain, effectively stealing time from the university.”

Kelly says Thompson was investigated for nine complaints that included accusations of harassment, bullying, and creating a hostile work environment. In one emailed complaint shared with City Paper, an officer informed Kelly that he intended to stay home from work due to Thompson’s alleged bullying. “I can’t continue to work with Sgt. Thompson because of his attitude, abuse, unprofessional choice of words, and he makes me feel very uncomfortable,” the officer writes.

Kelly says Thompson frequently referred to his “friends on the third floor,” suggesting that he had connections to Franklin’s office that could shield him from consequences. On at least one occasion, Kelly says Thompson threatened to have him fired.

Following an investigation into Thompson’s alleged misconduct, UDC’s human resources department recommended termination. Kelly says Franklin disagreed and overruled the recommendation. When HR reduced the discipline to a demotion to patrol officer, Franklin interjected again, according to internal emails obtained by City Paper. Thompson was instead given a nine-day suspension without pay and was ordered to attend anger management classes, emails show.

By the time Thompson’s suspension was finalized, Kelly had uncovered evidence that the sergeant had been falsifying his time cards and stealing time from the university.

In a memo dated Nov. 5, Kelly describes hearing Thompson announce over the radio that he was en route to his assigned post at 10:02 p.m. when he was supposed to arrive at 10. Kelly asked him to radio again when he had officially arrived at work, and Thompson did so at 10:34 p.m.

The dispatcher “informed me that it was common for Sergeant Thompson to report in this manner,” Kelly says in the memo. “He often claims to be enroute while not arriving at work on time—sometimes as late as 30 minutes after his scheduled shift.”

A few days later, Kelly says Thompson submitted a request to “retroactively change his timecard to allocate half an hour of sick leave for his tardiness.” (Bold included in Kelly’s memo.)

“This request indicates admission of guilt and demonstrates premeditation regarding his actions,” Kelly writes. When he dug into Thompson’s time cards, he found more discrepancies.

“Supporting documentation includes several time sheets indicating he did not report his late arrivals, CAD entries confirming his late arrivals, audio recordings of radio communications, and video evidence of his arrival time on campus,” the memo says.

In an email, Thompson says the allegations of time theft and favoritism are “false and untrue,” and he says he “was not terminated, charged, or under investigation” by UDC.

“Therefore, if you decide to print this story, I would air [sic] on the side of caution,” he adds, suggesting that City Paper reach out to Franklin and Edington, the UDC president.

Thompson included in his email a long letter with several accusations against Kelly that are similar to those filed in a complaint with the university last summer. The letter accuses Kelly of embellishing his resume, instructing an officer to walk his dog while at work, and hiring an officer with a history of misconduct. Kelly provided City Paper with a document that he says came from UDC’s HR department, which says in part: “The allegations made by the anonymous group of individuals are unfounded.” 

“Several of the allegations appear to stem from disgruntled employees, including lieutenants and sergeants, who are resistant to changes the Chief is implementing,” the purported HR document says.

Franklin did not respond to an emailed request for an interview. Instead, UDC’s assistant director of media relations, Rachel Perrone, replied, saying, “Unfortunately we’re not able to comment on ongoing investigations or personnel matters.” She did not respond to a follow-up email asking what investigation she was referring to.

Kelly says the university’s human resources department interviewed Thompson about the alleged time theft, and Thompson resigned the next day. But Kelly still felt compelled to get some outside guidance. He told Franklin that he intended to report the time theft to the inspector general’s office, but the COO instructed him not to take any action until the two of them had a chance to discuss it. That’s when, Kelly says, Franklin canceled a series of meetings with him for the next four and a half months.

“He was ducking me,” Kelly says. “No one’s that damn busy that for five months every meeting you schedule, you cancel.”

***

At the end of Kelly’s testimony in March, he said he hoped that by alerting the Council, lawmakers would explore whether there’s a deeper issue. “There may be other people who have been retaliated against,” he said during the hearing.

Mendelson thanked him for his testimony and then moved on. As Kelly left the witness table, Edington and Franklin replaced him.

When Mendelson asked them about the university’s allotment of overtime for its cops, Edington praised Kelly’s efforts to address the issue by changing the schedule.

“I believe that that is going to lead to a significant reduction in those overtime hours,” Edington said. “It continues to be an issue with the police officers in terms of the need to have them work. But it’s something that we’re working on to get that addressed.”

Franklin told Mendelson that they hoped to reduce the overtime hours by hiring more officers. But even when they are able to bring on new recruits, UDC often has trouble retaining them because they don’t pay as well as other departments. At the time, UDC had 17 officers and seven vacancies.

Mendelson didn’t ask any questions about Kelly’s claims of time theft or Franklin’s alleged interference with the disciplinary process before he excused the UDC executives.

He says in a recent interview that he forwarded Kelly’s allegations to the inspector general and followed up separately with Edington, who said the university has launched an investigation.

“It’s both understandable and disturbing that the university would not want to comment on this,” Mendelson says. “Disturbing because it allows the allegations to be unrefuted and if there are arguments against the allegations it would be helpful to the university if they would say more.”

Kelly says he hasn’t heard from the Council chair’s office, but he has filed complaints with the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability and the inspector general. In April, he says he was contacted by a UDC representative asking him to come in for an interview related to his whistleblower complaint where he claimed he was wrongly terminated.

Kelly sent an email to all 13 councilmembers, some agency heads, UDC employees, news organizations, and others about UDC’s request for an interview. He says he asked to see the questions in advance and for time to find a lawyer, but was told the investigation would proceed without him. He tells City Paper that he has heard the university hired a new police chief, which he considers premature since they have not finished investigating his complaint.

“How can you do an investigation without the complaint [sic] participating,” he writes. “Is this the kind of leadership we expect from UDC?”

The email also includes details of two incidents involving UDC officers since he was fired. One officer was “caught driving drunk—over three times the legal limit—while on duty in a UDC patrol car, armed and in uniform,” he writes, adding that the officer was sent home with a family member rather than being arrested. Another officer was caught “driving over 80 mph in a 50 mph zone in a UDC cruiser.” Again, the officer wasn’t charged or disciplined, Kelly reports.

He calls on the UDC Board of Trustees, the Council, and the mayor to take a closer look at the university’s cops.

“I still haven’t talked to the president,” he tells City Paper. “These are serious allegations, and for you as the president of the university to still not reach out to me? That’s a problem. What are you scared of?”

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sarcozona
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acdha
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Tim Burchett Tells Fox News Drinking Straws Are For Women

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Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told Fox News on Thursday that he doesn’t “drink out of a straw” because “that’s what the women in my house do.”

During a montage of interviews on Jesse Watters Primetime, Fox News producer and man-on-the-street Johnny Belisario asked Republican members of the House and Senate for their thoughts on Fox News host Jesse Watters’ controversial “rules for men.”

“He says men should not drink out of a straw in public, or at all,” Belisario told Burchett, to which the congressman replied, “I don’t drink out of a straw, brother. That’s what the women in my house do.”

After Belisario asked Rep. John Kennedy (R-LA), “What do you want to tell Jesse Watters on Fox News?” Kennedy said, “Pay his taxes. I knew him when he was poor. That’s how long I’ve known Watters.”

Asked, “He says men shouldn’t eat soup in public. What do you think of that?” Kennedy answered, “A man shouldn’t eat kale at all. You know the best way to prepare kale? You mix a little olive oil in with the kale, that way it slides out of the pan very easily into the garbage.”

Belisario also interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) about Watters’ rules for men.

“Jesse Watters has rules for men. He said men should not have male best friends. What do you think?” Belisario asked Cruz, to which the senator replied, “Jesse needs a friend.”

Asked for his opinion on Watters’ rule that “men should not cross their legs,” Hawley concluded, “Whatever Jesse says is good with me.”

Watch above via Fox News.

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acdha
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Why can’t this be a joke?
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sarcozona
14 hours ago
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