Outer Banks visitors evacuate ahead of Maria

OCRACOKE — Authorities ordered hundreds of visitors Monday to leave much of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, warily eyeing Hurricane Maria already kicking up heavy surf along the Southeast coast.

More than 200 visitors have already left Hyde County’s Ocracoke Island amid a mandatory evacuation order imposed early Monday on that fragile barrier island jutting into the Atlantic. Authorities warn that high winds and flooding are possible threats as Maria passes well offshore. Neighboring Dare County also ordered an evacuation of visitors from neighboring Hatteras Island starting at midday.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami has issued a tropical storm warning from Cape Lookout north up the coast to the Virginia line. A tropical storm watch also was in effect for other areas.

Tourists packed up and drove off — some after only one day of what was supposed to be a weeklong vacation. Business owners braced for what they said would be yet another financial hit this season.

A construction accident at the peak of tourist season in late July had cut power to Ocracoke and Hatteras for several days, resulting in the evacuation of an estimated 50,000 tourists. Businesses lost millions of dollars.

Chips Stevens, the owner of Blackbeard’s Lodge on Ocracoke, said Maria effectively makes 2017 a two-storm season, which is the “worst-case scenario.”

“You can have a really good season up until a storm, and then it ends up being an average or a below-average season,” Stevens said. “But if you have two storms that makes it very difficult. Fall is often where you make your profit.”

Even in late September with school back in session, the Outer Banks attracts newlyweds and empty nesters. So-called “snow birds” also come through on their drive south. Business continues into October with fishermen.

“We can get some decent storms in October,” Stevens said. “God forbid we get anything else.”

On Hatteras, Jay Wrenn and his wife packed up their car for the five-hour drive back home to Burlington, North Carolina.

They had arrived at their rented cottage in Rodanthe on Sunday with a week’s worth of groceries. By noon Monday the macaroni salad they had made was in the trash.

Wrenn doubted they would make the drive back if the evacuation order is lifted Thursday. It would leave too little time.

“It’s an overreaction like most of them are,” Wrenn, 66, said of the evacuation order. “There may be some danger but I think it’s on the low end.”

At 2p.m. EDT Monday, the hurricane was centered about 300 miles (480 kilometers) south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Maria had top sustained winds of 80 mph (130 kph) and was moving to the north at 7 mph (11 kph). The hurricane center said the core of Maria was expected to move well east of the Southeast U.S. coast over the coming day while it gradually weakens. It was expected to become a tropical storm on Tuesday night.

Forecasters said storm surge flooding is possible starting Tuesday in the coastal sounds of the Outer Banks.

In developments, authorities said Monday, an apparent piece of World War II ordnance has washed up on North Carolina’s Outer Banks amid heavy swells from Hurricane Maria lurking offshore. The U.S. National Park Service said the unexploded device was found Monday on a beach at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in Avon. An explosive ordnance disposal unit from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point was headed to the site to remove the device. The park service said it’s the third time unexploded ordnance has washed ashore this year. And WITN in Greenville reported another item was found Monday morning on Whale Head Beach elsewhere on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Currituck County Sheriff’s Lt. Jason Banks said the Cherry Point unit determined the other device was a training mine, and because it wasn’t live, there was no danger to the public.

Maria battered the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico as a major Category 4 hurricane last week. It claimed dozens of lives in its rampage across the Caribbean.

OCRACOKE

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Trump and Sessions Are Right That Violent Crime Is Up, but Police Chiefs Say Their Criminal Justice Plans Are Wrong

Violent crime in the U.S. increased again in 2016, a rise that could be viewed as reinforcing the dark, “American carnage” view of America expressed by President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions—but prominent police chiefs and criminal justice experts criticized that as a false narrative and said crime remains near historic lows.

The number of murders spiked by almost 9 percent in 2016—to a total of 17,250—while violent crime increased by about 4 percent, according to new numbers released by the FBI on Monday. (Property crimes fell by about 1 percent.) The jumps in violent crime and murder mirror the results from the previous year, when figures for those crimes increased by about the same amounts, though the violent crime rate in 2015 was still only about half the rate in 1991.

Trump defined his view on crime during his inauguration speech in January, when he described “the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives,” and infamously promised to stop the “American carnage.” The next month, the president signed three executive orders that he said would “restore safety in America” by getting tougher on drug traffickers, undocumented immigrants and anyone who commits a crime against law enforcement officers.

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Sessions has read from the same playbook, saying repeatedly that the nation’s violent crime is rising. In May, he ordered federal prosecutors to charge defendants with the most serious possible offenses—tossing out the more progressive policy enacted under President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice in a move widely seen as rejuvenating the war on drugs.

“After decreasing for nearly 20 years because of the hard but necessary work our country started in the 1980s, violent crime is back with a vengeance,” Sessions told the Fraternal Order of Police in Nashville last month, adding that the 2015 murder rate increase was the largest since 1968. In a statement on the new FBI numbers Monday, he said, “For the sake of all Americans, we must confront and turn back the rising tide of violent crime.”

Jeff Sessions with Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York City on October 7, 2016. Mike Segar/Reuters

But many police chiefs and criminal justice advocates have seen the new FBI numbers and drawn the opposite conclusion. “The president and the attorney general want a return to the crime-fighting strategies of the 1990s,” Ronal Serpas, former superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department and current chairman of Law Enforcement Leaders, tells Newsweek. He defines such strategies as “high rates of punishing the bogeyman, and low rates of success.”

Serpas acknowledges that certain cities, like Chicago and Baltimore, are dealing with surges in violence and murder, but says localized spikes in crime require localized responses, not federal pushes to increase arrests and toughen sentences. Smart police departments across the country are partnering with health departments and formulating strategies that recognize that half the people in jail and prison have mental health issues.

“I’ve been around politicians a long time,” Serpas says when asked why he thinks Trump and Sessions focus on the idea of a crime wave. “It’s not uncommon for politicians to claim there’s a problem they know doesn’t exist, and then turn around a year later and claim victory.”

Ronal Serpas (right), superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, speaks with Janet Napolitano (left), U.S. secretary of homeland security, as Jeffrey Miller (center), the NFL’s chief security officer, looks on during a security news conference before the NFL Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans on January 30, 2013. REUTERS/Joe Skipper

The New York City police commissioner also said the FBI figures show no evidence of a crime wave. “Today’s new data confirms what we in New York City have known for years now: Enhanced training, improved tactics and constructive engagement with the public we serve all lead to long-term reductions in crime,” said NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill in a statement sent by Law Enforcement Leaders, a project of the Brennan Center for Justice that includes about 200 current and former police chiefs, sheriffs and prosecutors. “More than ever, the NYPD focuses its efforts on the underlying drivers of crime and disorder.” 

The overall crime rate is expected to drop slightly this year, according to the Brennan Center, a law and policy institute at NYU School of Law. If its estimate holds, the violent crime rate for 2017 would be second lowest since 1990, the Brennan Center said earlier this month.

“The data debunk claims from the Trump Administration that crime is out of control, but do highlight cities where violence is concerning,” Inimai Chettiar, director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, said in a statement on Monday. “Chicago, for example, has had serious issues that need to be addressed. But by painting the entire country with too broad a brush, President Trump and Attorney General Sessions are peddling fear and distracting from the frank and honest conversations needed to find solutions to these real problems.”

The Charles Koch Institute, which works on criminal justice and police reform, echoed arguments that more arrests and tougher sentencing—the approach favored by the Trump administration—would not lead to a lower crime rate. “From 2010-2015, the crime rate fell by an average of 14.4 percent in the 10 states with the largest imprisonment declines, and it fell by only 8.1 percent in the 10 states with the largest growth in imprisonment,” read an email Monday from the Charles Koch Institute, which was founded and is funded by the Kansas billionaire.

“What we have seen is that in states like Texas and Georgia and Utah, states where they’ve had criminal justice reforms, we’ve had crime go down at the same time that we passed sentencing reform,” Jordan Richardson, a senior policy analyst at the Charles Koch Institute, tells Newsweek. “We have to remember that crime is a local issue, and local solutions are often what are needed.”

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