The Los Angeles Times reports on a “major overhaul of the Los Angeles School Police Department, [when] the Board of Education on Tuesday approved a plan that cuts a third of its officers, bans the use of pepper spray on students and diverts funds from the department to improve the education of Black students. The unanimous decision comes after a yearlong campaign by students activists and community members to reimagine the school police force, which they maintain disproportionately targets Black and Latino children. Their drive and recent calls to completely defund the school Police Department intensified following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, which forced cities and school districts across the country to consider how police use of force has disproportionately hurt Black Americans.”
The Washington Post reports on how lack of health services and public transit impede access to vaccine in communities of color: “Public health experts, physicians and civil rights advocates say attention must be paid to the practical barriers that fuel the disparities that have become a hallmark of the American health-care system. If not accounted for, they say, those same obstacles stand to stymie efforts to bridge a growing divide in coronavirus vaccinations. “Covid is exploiting not just human virus response, but our structured health-care response as well,” said Janice C. Probst, director emerita of the University of South Carolina’s Rural and Minority Health Research Center. “It finds the gaps.”
PI’s Elva Yañez was interviewed by Stormwater Magazine on the links between health equity, racial justice, and stormwater infrastructure. “I learned a lot about the dynamics of stormwater public financing and the relationship between stormwater and health. It was striking to me how stormwater regulations have a strong basis in public health, but there is very little orientation to public health when it comes to stormwater management or public financing for stormwater management systems,” she says. Becoming involved in stormwater equity felt natural to Yañez. “It was like the connective tissue between parks and open space were the equity issues and the green stormwater infrastructure overlap,” she says.’