Donald Trump appears to be souring on one of his top advisers, dodging a question from the New York Post about his confidence in chief strategist Steve Bannon.
“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said Tuesday. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist.”
Trump tends to speak in superlatives about his political allies – often deploying words like “tremendous” and “fantastic” to describe them. But his less enthusiastic answer about Bannon comes amid reports of infighting in the Trump White House, all of which place the gruff, irascible Bannon at the center.
Trump concluded his brief interview with the Post with what seemed to be a reference to these disputes, saying: “Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.”
A week ago Bannon was also axed from Trump’s national security council. His appointment there during the first couple weeks of Trump’s presidency raised eyebrows, as “advisers” do not traditionally hold such a role. The White House downplayed the significance of the move, but officials close to the situation told the Guardian it was “huge” and “a big deal”.
Reports from Washington have situated Bannon on the losing end of a power struggle with other top Trump confidantes, namely Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Bannon, a white nationalist sympathizer and former Breitbart publisher, is thought to be the voice of the “alt-right” in Trump’s administration, while Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, are perceived as more mainstream, and even supposedly liberalizing influences on the president.
CNN reported that on Thursday at Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago Florida retreat, he told the two men: “We gotta work this out” and “Cut it out.” On Friday, Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, apparently brokered a meeting for the men to try to smooth out some of their differences. Publicly, the White House has played down any notion of a rift.
Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to the findings of a Guardian study that recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year.
Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age.
Paired with official government mortality data, this new finding indicates that about one in every 65 deaths of a young African American man in the US is a killing by police.
“This epidemic is disproportionately affecting black people,” said Brittany Packnett, an activist and member of the White House taskforce on policing. “We are wasting so many promising young lives by continuing to allow this to happen.”
Speaking in the same week that a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio, was cleared by a grand jury over the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy who was carrying a toy gun, Packnett said the criminal justice system was presenting “no deterrent” to the excessive use of deadly force by police. “Tamir didn’t even live to be 15,” she said.
Protests accusing law enforcement officers of being too quick to use lethal force against unarmed African Americans have spread across the country in the 16 months since dramatic unrest gripped Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white officer.
Overall in 2015, black people were killed at twice the rate of white, Hispanic and native Americans. About 25% of the African Americans killed were unarmed, compared with 17% of white people. This disparity has narrowed since the database was first published on 1 June, at which point black people killed were found to be twice as likely to not have a weapon.
The Guardian’s investigation, titled The Counted, began in response to widespread concern about the federal government’s failure to keep any comprehensive record of people killed by police. Officials at the US Department of Justice have since begun testing a database that attempts to do so, directly drawing on The Counted’s data and methodology.
The FBI also announced plans to overhaul its own count of homicides by police, which has been discredited by its reliance on the voluntary submission of data from a fraction of the country’s 18,000 police departments. The Guardian’s total for 2015 was more than two and a half times greater than the 444 “justifiable homicides” logged by the FBI last year.
The FBI director, James Comey, said in October it was “embarrassing and ridiculous” that the government did not hold comprehensive statistics, and that it was “unacceptable” the Guardian and the Washington Post, which began publishing a database of fatal police shootings on 1 July, held better records. The Counted will continue into 2016.
Data collected by the Guardian this year highlighted the wide range of situations encountered by police officers across the US. Of the 1,134 people killed, about one in five were unarmed but another one in five fired shots of their own at officers before being killed. At least six innocent bystanders were killed by officers during violent incidents; eight police officers were killed by people who subsequently died and appeared in the database.
More than 21% of deadly incidents began with a complaint to police alleging domestic violence or some other domestic disturbance. About 16% arose from officers attempting to arrest a wanted person, execute a warrant or apprehend a fugitive. Another 14% of killings followed an attempted traffic or street stop, 13% came after someone committed a violent crime and 7% after a non-violent crime.
“It would appear that police officers are often confronting people who are armed, non-compliant and threatening,” said David Klinger an associate professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St Louis.
The extensive demographic detail gathered as part of the study also shed light on the diverse set of people who died during confrontations with law enforcement. The group ranged in age from six-year-old Jeremy Mardis, in Marksville, Louisiana, to 87-year-old Louis Becker in Catskill, New York. Officers killed 43 people who were 18 years old and younger.
Mental health crises contributed directly to dozens of police-involved deaths. In at least 92 cases that led to fatalities this year, police had been alerted over a suicidal person or someone who was harming him- or herself. In 28 other deadly incidents, relatives or associates later said that the person killed had been suicidal before they died.
Of 29 military veterans who were killed by police in 2015, at least eight were said to have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following their service. In all, mental health issues were reported in relation to 246 people killed by police this year – more than one in every five cases. On at least eight occasions, the death was officially ruled a suicide, prompting claims from relatives that officers were escaping scrutiny.
“We have a tremendous problem,” said Dr Daniel Reidenberg, the managing director of the National Council for Suicide Prevention. “In a society where firearms are as prevalent as they are, and where people know law enforcement are trained to respond to a certain situation in a certain way, we have a problem.”
Regional disparities also emerged from the year’s data. Earlier this month, the Guardian published a series of special reports on Kern County, California, where police killed more people relative to the size of its population than anywhere else in the country. Law enforcement officers there killed more people in 2015 than the NYPD, which has 23 times as many officers policing a population 10 times as big.
Following a spate of killings in recent weeks, New Mexico’s 21 deaths in 2015 represented the highest per-capita rate of any state. New Mexico’s rate of one killing by police for every 99,300 residents was more than 10 times greater than that of Rhode Island, where only one person among a population of more than a million was killed by law enforcement.
The death of Kenneth Stephens, 56, in Burlington, Vermont, last week meant that all 50 states and the District of Columbia had at least one death caused by police in 2015.
Only one of the 21 people killed by police in New Mexico, however, was unarmed. By contrast nine of the 25 people killed in New York state were unarmed, and seven of these were black men. While five of Georgia’s 38 deaths followed a suspect being shocked with a Taser – the highest proportion in the country – no Taser-involved deaths were recorded in more than half a dozen states.
In all, 89% of deaths by police in 2015 were caused by gunshot, 4% were Taser-related, 4% were deaths in custody following physical confrontations and 3% were deaths of people struck by police officers driving vehicles.
The Counted found that in at least 255 deaths in 2015, the actions of police officers involved had been ruled justified. These rulings were typically made by a district attorney who worked alongside the department of the officers involved in prosecuting everyday crimes. About a quarter of the justified cases were decided on by a grand jury of the public.
Law enforcement officers were charged with crimes in relation to 18 of 2015’s deadly incidents – 10 shootings, four deadly vehicle crashes and four deaths in custody.
By the end of the year, one officer had been acquitted of charges relating to a fatal shooting in Pennsylvania, and the first attempt at prosecuting one of the officers involved in the deadly arrest of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, had ended in a mistrial. Two deputies in Georgia charged over the in-custody death of Matthew Ajibade were cleared of manslaughter but convicted of cruelty, perjury and falsifying paperwork.
Philip Stinson, an associate professor at Bowling Green University who monitors the subject, said the number of officers being charged had risen sharply this year. “There is more public awareness, and I do think that in the past few years the veracity of police officers is being questioned more, after their statements were shown to not be consistent with video evidence,” he said.
Four military personnel have been killed in attacks on two facilities in Tennessee.
Chattanooga mayor Andy Berke said the gunman was killed and that three others, including a Chattanooga police officer, were injured.
The attack was being treated as an act of terrorism, FBI special agent Ed Reinhold said, and links to international terrorism had not been ruled out.
“We will treat this as a terrorism investigation until it can be determined that it was not,” he said.
Berke described the attack as “incomprehensible” and “a nightmare for the city of Chattanooga”.
Authorities would not indicate whether the gunman was killed by law enforcement, or by a self-inflicted wound.
The suspected gunman was believed to have lived in the Chattanooga area, the FBI said. Authorities would not say if he had a background in the armed services.
The shooting began around 10.45am at the Armed Forces Career Center on Lee Highway in Chattanooga. Gina Mule, a witness at the Lee Highway location, told CNN that she saw a white male in a silver convertible Ford Mustang with a gun.
“He had a big, big high-powered rifle. He was opening fire on the Air Force, Marines and Navy offices,” she said.
Mule said she saw the man reload his rifle and then drive away.
Law enforcement officials told recruiters they were attacked by a shooter in a car. The shooter stopped in front of the recruiting facility, shot at the building and drove off, said Brian Lepley, a spokesman with the US army recruiting command in Fort Knox, Kentucky.
Images of a door to the center in a strip mall showed more than a dozen bullet holes in the glass.
The army recruiters at the facility told Lepley they were not hurt and had been evacuated; Lepley said he had no information about recruiters for the other branches at the facility.
An active duty army recruiter said he was at his office when someone opened fire and he heard 30 to 50 shots.
“We heard one single shot, which kind of sparked our attention. Shortly after that, just a few seconds, the shooter began shooting more rounds. We realized it was an actual shooting, so we then initiated our active shooter drill: getting down low to the ground, moving to a safe location. And we waited until everything seemed to be clear.” He said he did not see the gunman or a vehicle.
Shortly after, there were reports of a shooting at a naval reserve center, believed to be the Navy Operational Support Center and Marine Corps Reserve Center, about six miles away on Amnicola Highway. All of the victims were killed at this location, FBI special agent Reinhold said.
The Department of Defense confirmed Thursday afternoon that four service members had been killed and one wounded during the two shootings.
Victims were taken to Erlanger Hospital, which had been placed on lockdown. A shopping mall, two nearby colleges and the Tennessee governor’s mansion were also placed on lockdown in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
A temporary flight restriction was placed over Chattanooga while police searched for the suspect. The Department of Homeland Security reportedly activated its Chattanooga Strike Team. The investigation is now being led by the FBI, in conjunction with the ATF, Department of Homeland Security, Tennessee Department of Homeland Security, and the Chattanooga police department.
Police set up a command post near one of the sites.
Barack Obama was briefed by his national security team on the shooting while on a trip to Oklahoma to speak about criminal justice reform at a federal prison.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the president would continue getting updates from his staff as needed.
