WASHINGTON — Do licensed gun owners have a right to carry a loaded weapon into stores, restaurants and other private places that are open to the public?
California and Hawaii are among five states with new laws that forbid carrying firearms onto private property without the consent of an owner or manager. But the Trump administration joined gun-rights advocates on Tuesday in urging the Supreme Court to strike down these laws as unconstitutional under the 2nd Amendment.
Such a law “effectively nullifies licenses to carry arms in public,” Trump’s lawyers said.
If you “stop at a gasoline station, you are committing a crime,” Deputy Solicitor Gen. Sarah Harris told the court.
An attorney representing Hawaii said the issue is one of property rights, not gun rights.
“An invitation to shop is not an invitation to bring your Glock,” Washington attorney Neal Katyal told the court. “There is no constitutional right to enter property that includes a right to bring firearms.”
The justices sounded split along the usual ideological lines, with the court’s conservatives signaling they are likely to strike down the new laws in five Democratic-led states.
“You are relegating the 2nd Amendment to second-class status,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told Katyal.
He said the court had ruled law-abiding persons have a right to carry a firearm for self-defense when they leave home. That would include going to stores or businesses that are open to the public.
“If the owners don’t like guns, why don’t they just put up a sign?” Alito said.
Both sides agreed that business owners are generally free to allow or prohibit guns on their property. However, state officials said, the laws are important because business owners rarely post signs that either welcome or forbid the carrying of guns.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the 2nd Amendment should have the same standing as the 1st Amendment.
He said it was understood based on the 1st Amendment that a political candidate may walk up to a house and knock on the door or drop off a pamphlet. He questioned why the court should uphold a law that limits gun owners from entering places that are open to the public.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh said they too believed the “right to keep and bear arms” included the right to carry weapons, including into stores.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson said property rights should prevail over gun rights.
“Is there a right to go on private property with a gun?” Sotomayor asked repeatedly. She said the court had never upheld such a broad right.
But with the possible exception of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, none of the conservatives agreed.
Four years ago, the court ruled law-abiding gun owners had a right to carry a concealed weapon for self-defense when they left home. They also said then that guns may be prohibited in “sensitive places” but they did not decide what that meant.
In the wake of that decision, California, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey and Maryland adopted new laws that restricted carrying guns in public places, including parks and beaches.
The laws also said gun owners may not take a gun into a privately owned business without the “express authorization” of an owner or manager. California’s law went a step further and said the owner must post a clear sign allowing guns.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the laws from Hawaii and California, except for the required posting of a sign in California.
Three Hawaii residents with concealed carry permits appealed to the Supreme Court and won the backing of the Trump administration.
WASHINGTON — Tips provided to federal investigators about Donald Trump’s alleged involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s schemes with young women and girls are “sensationalist” and “untrue,” the Justice Department said on Tuesday, after a new tranche of files released from the probe featured multiple references to the president.
The documents include a limousine driver reportedly overhearing Trump discussing a man named Jeffrey “abusing” a girl, and an alleged victim accusing Trump and Epstein of rape. It is unclear whether the FBI followed up on the tips. The alleged rape victim died from a gunshot wound to the head after reporting the incident.
Nowhere in the newly released files do federal law enforcement agents or prosecutors indicate that Trump was suspected of wrongdoing, or that Trump — whose friendship with Epstein lasted through the mid-2000s — was investigated himself.
But one unidentified federal prosecutor noted in a 2020 email that Trump had flown on Epstein’s private jet “many more times than previously has been reported,” including over a time period when Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s top confidante who would ultimately be convicted on five federal counts of sex trafficking and abuse, was being investigated for criminal activity.
The Justice Department released an unusual statement unequivocally defending the president.
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the Justice Department statement read. “To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
“Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims,” the department added.
The Justice Department files were released with heavy redactions after bipartisan lawmakers in Congress passed a new law compelling it to do so, despite Trump lobbying Republicans aggressively over the summer and fall to oppose the bill. The president ultimately signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law after the legislation passed with veto-proof majorities in both chambers.
One newly released file containing a letter purportedly from Epstein — a notorious child sex offender who died in jail while awaiting federal trial on sex-trafficking charges — drew widespread attention online, but was held up by the Justice Department as an example of faulty or misleading information contained in the files.
The letter appeared to be sent by Epstein to Larry Nassar, another convicted sex offender, shortly before Epstein’s death. The letter’s author suggested that Nassar would learn after receiving the note that Epstein had “taken the ‘short route’ home,” possibly referring to his suicide. It was postmarked from Virginia on Aug. 13, 2019, despite Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail three days prior.
“Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls,” the letter reads. “When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”
The Justice Department said that the FBI had confirmed that the letter is “FAKE” after it made the rounds on Tuesday.
“This fake letter serves as a reminder that just because a document is released by the Department of Justice does not make the allegations or claims within the document factual,” the department posted on social media. “Nevertheless, the DOJ will continue to release all material required by law.”
The department has faced bipartisan scrutiny since failing to release all of the Epstein files in its possession by Dec. 19, the legal deadline for it to do so, and for redacting material on the vast majority of the documents.
Justice Department officials said they were following the law by protecting victims with the redactions. The Epstein Files Transparency Act also directs the department not to redact images or references to prominent or political figures, and to provide an explanation for each and every redaction in writing.
The latest release, just days before the Christmas holiday, includes roughly 30,000 documents, the department said. Hundreds of thousands more are expected to be released in the coming weeks.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a statement in response to the Tuesday release accusing the Justice Department of a “cover-up,” writing on social media, “the new DOJ documents raise serious questions about the relationship between Epstein and Donald Trump.”
Documents from Epstein’s private estate released by the oversight committee earlier this fall had already cast a spotlight on that relationship, revealing Epstein had written in emails to associates that Trump “knew about the girls.”
The latest documents release also includes an email from an individual identified as “A,” claiming to stay at Balmoral Castle, a royal residence in Scotland, asking Maxwell if she had found him “some new inappropriate friends.” Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, has come under intense scrutiny over his ties to Epstein in recent years.
Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, Trump said the continuing Epstein scandal amounts to a “distraction” from Republican successes, and expressed disapproval over the release of images in the files that reveal associates of Epstein.
“I believe they gave over 100,000 pages of documents, and there’s tremendous backlash,” Trump told reporters. “It’s an interesting question, because a lot of people are very angry that pictures are being released of other people that really had nothing to do with Epstein. But they’re in a picture with him because he was at a party, and you ruin a reputation of somebody. So a lot of people are very angry that this continues.”
California is once again fighting in federal court for a Jewish family’s right to have a precious Impressionist painting returned to them by a Spanish museum nearly 90 years after it was looted by the Nazis.
The state is also defending its own authority to legally require art and other stolen treasures to be returned to other victims with ties to the state, even in disputes that stretch far beyond its borders.
The state has repeatedly weighed in on the case since the Cassirer family first filed it while living in San Diego in 2005. Last year, California passed a new law designed to bolster the legal rights of the Cassirers and other families in the state to recover valuable property stolen from them in acts of genocide or political persecution.
On Monday, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office filed a motion to intervene in the Cassirer case directly in order to defend that law. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation — which is owned by Spain and holds the Camille Pissarro masterpiece — has claimed that the law is unconstitutional and should therefore be ignored.
Bonta, in a statement to The Times, said the law is “about fairness, moral — and legal — responsibility, and doing what’s right,” and the state will defend it in court.
“There is nothing that can undo the horrors and loss experienced by individuals during the Holocaust. But there is something we can do — that California has done — to return what was stolen back to survivors and their families and bring them some measure of justice and healing,” Bonta said. “As attorney general, my job is to defend the laws of California, and I intend to do so here.”
Bonta said his office “has supported the Cassirers’ quest for justice for two decades,” and “will continue to fight with them for the rightful return of this invaluable family heirloom.”
Thaddeus J. Stauber, an attorney for the museum, did not answer questions from The Times. Bonta’s office said Stauber did not oppose its intervening in the case.
Sam Dubbin, the Cassirers’ longtime attorney, thanked Bonta’s office for “intervening in this case again to defend California’s interests in protecting the integrity of the art market and the rights of stolen-property victims.”
“California law has always provided strong protections for the victims of stolen property and stolen art in particular, which the Legislature has consistently reinforced,” Dubbin said.
Bonta’s latest move ratchets up the intrigue surrounding the 20-year-old case, which is being watched around the globe for its potential implications in the high-stakes world of looted art litigation.
The painting in question — Pissarro’s “Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain” — is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Both sides acknowledge it was stolen from Lilly Cassirer Neubauer by the Nazis in 1939, after she agreed in desperation to surrender it to a Nazi appraiser in exchange for a visa to flee Germany at the dawn of World War II.
The attention surrounding the case, and its potential to set new precedent in international law, likely makes the painting even more valuable.
After World War II, Lilly received compensation for the painting from the German government, but the family never relinquished its right to the masterpiece — which at the time was considered lost. What she was paid was a fraction of the current estimated worth.
In the decades that followed, Lilly’s grandson Claude Cassirer — who had also survived the Holocaust — moved with his family to San Diego.
In 2000, Claude made the shocking discovery that the painting was not lost to time after all, but part of a vast art collection that Spain had acquired from the late Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, the scion of a German industrialist family with ties to Adolf Hitler’s regime. Spain restored an early 19th century palace near the Prado Museum in Madrid in order to house the collection as the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Claude asked the museum to return the painting to his family. It refused. He sued in U.S. federal court in 2005. The case has been moving through the courts ever since.
California passed its new law in response to the 9th Circuit ruling last year that held state law at the time required it to apply an archaic Spanish law. That measure dictates that the title to stolen goods passes legitimately to a new owner over time, if that owner wasn’t aware the goods were stolen when they acquired them — which the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection has argued makes its ownership of the painting legally sound.
In September 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the new law during a small gathering with the families of Holocaust survivors at the Holocaust Museum LA. Lilly’s great-grandson and Claude’s son David Cassirer, who now lives in Colorado, was there, praising the state’s lawmakers for “taking a definitive stand in favor of the true owners of stolen art.”
In March, the Supreme Court in a brief order ruled that the 9th Circuit must reconsider its ruling in light of California’s new law.
In September, the Thyssen-Bournemisza Collection filed a motion asking the appellate court to rule in its favor once more. It put forward multiple arguments, but among them was that California’s new law was “constitutionally indefensible” and deprived the museum of its due process rights.
“Under binding Supreme Court precedent, a State may not, by legislative fiat, reopen time-barred claims and transfer property whose ownership is already vested,” the museum argued.
It said the U.S., under federal law, “does not seek to impose its property laws or the property laws of its own states on other foreign sovereigns, but rather expressly acknowledges that different legal traditions and systems must be taken into account to facilitate just and fair solutions with regard to Nazi-looted art cases.”
It said California’s law takes an “aggressive approach” that “disrupts the federal government’s efforts to maintain uniformity and amicable relations with foreign nations,” and “stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of federal policy.”
David Cassirer, the lead plaintiff in the case since Claude’s death in 2010, argued the opposite in his own filing to the court.
Cassirer argued that California’s new law requires an outcome in his favor — which he said would also happen to be in line with “moral commitments made by the United States and governments worldwide, including Spain, to Nazi victims and their families.”
“It is undisputed that California substantive law mandates the award of title here to the Cassirer family, as Lilly’s heirs, of which Plaintiff David Cassirer is the last surviving member,” Cassirer’s attorneys wrote.
They wrote that California law holds that “a thief cannot convey good title to stolen works of art,” and therefore requires the return of the painting to Cassirer.
Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), who sponsored the bill in the Legislature, praised Bonta for stepping in to defend the law — which he called “part of a decades-long quest for justice and is rooted in the belief that California must stand on the right side of history.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom Thursday signed a package of bills designed to alleviate the state’s housing affordability crisis.
The new laws aim to boost the availability of housing in a variety of ways, including streamlining the approval process for certain projects and requiring that local municipalities create plans to house the most vulnerable Californians.
“The original sin in this state is affordability,” Newsom said at news conference. “That is the challenge we are trying to address.”
The bill signings Thursday follow a number of actions lawmakers have taken in recent years to make housing more affordable.
There have been big ticket items like eliminating most single-family only zones to allow duplexes and so-called accessory dwelling units, as well as more under-the-radar efforts that have boosted ADU construction and chipped away at the ability local governments have to block housing developments.
One of those lesser known laws is Assembly Bill 2011, a law from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) that streamlined the approval process for housing projects on certain types of commercial land if developers reserve some units for lower-income residents.
On Wednesday, developer Thrive Living and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass celebrated the groundbreaking of what was billed as the first AB 2011 project to move forward in the city. The Baldwin Village development will consist of 800 apartments on top of a ground-floor Costco store. Just over 180 of those units will be for low-income households.
In his news conference Thursday, Newsom said the total housing package includes 32 bills and he signed seven at the event that tweak a number of existing rules to try to spur more housing.
One measure from Wicks, AB 2243, amends the law that Thrive Living used in Los Angeles. Under the new rules, developers will be able to receive the streamlined approval in more areas than they do now, including regional malls and land closer to freeways.
Another bill, AB 3093 from Assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego), requires that local municipalities plan for housing that will be available to households making up to 15% and up to 30% of the area‘s median income.
Currently, the lowest income bracket communities must plan for is less than 50% of area median income, meaning in theory that cities could fulfill those goals by building housing just for people making 49% of local income.
Officials say that by adding the new, lower income categories it will help create more housing for people who are homeless or at greatest risk of losing their homes.
Local municipalities will also face stricter penalties if they reject housing projects in ways that state law does not allow them to do.
Under Senate Bill 1037, from State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), communities will face civil penalties up to $50,000 a month for as long as a violation persists. The money will be deposited into a state fund and used to develop income-restricted housing in that community.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday signed two bills that tweak existing shelter and ADU laws in an attempt to boost supply and make a dent in the state’s housing and homelessness crisis.
One of the bills, Assembly Bill 3057, focuses on something called junior ADUs — units created within existing houses that can be up to 500 square feet and don’t need their own bathroom.
Under the new law, junior ADUs — like larger ADUs — will be exempt from requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act that can add time and cost to projects.
The bill’s author, Assemblymember Lori D. Wilson (D-Suisun City), called the exemption a “a small but significant technical change that offers Californians more accessible and efficient options to build affordable housing solutions.”
The second bill, Assembly Bill 2835, was authored by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino). It makes permanent a set of temporary rules that have made it easier to house homeless individuals in privately owned hotels and motels for longer than 30 days.
Local governments, including Los Angeles, have increasingly turned to that strategy to get people off the streets, at times relying on state funding.
“The homelessness crisis demands immediate and innovative action, not the status quo,” Newsom said in a statement. “With these new laws, local governments have even more tools to provide housing. I urge them to fully utilize the state’s unprecedented resources to address homelessness.”
Those 3, 5 and 20% fees at the bottom of your menu could be here to stay. With little time to spare, a new law will allow restaurants and bars to continue charging service fees, healthcare costs and other surcharges when listed clearly for diners to see. The practice was set to be outlawed beginning Monday.
On Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1524, an emergency measure to exempt California food and beverage vendors from Senate Bill 478 — a law that goes into effect in July and targets ticket sellers, hotel and travel websites and other businesses that charge “hidden” or “junk” fees.
Before Newsom signed SB 1524, which was introduced in early June, restaurants and bars were included in the affected businesses, and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta had advised that the food and beverage vendors roll such fees into listed menu prices to avoid the possibility of legal action.
“These deceptive fees prevent us from knowing how much we will be charged at the outset,” the attorney general, who co-sponsored SB 478, said in a statement the day it was signed. Bonta could not be reached for comment regarding the exemptions allowed by SB 1524.
Numerous business operators in the service industry have been vocal against SB 478, which passed in October. They said they feared that raising list prices during a tumultuous year marked by closures and inflation would cost them more customers and support. Multiple restaurateurs told the Los Angeles Times that the process of revising or entirely overhauling their tipping and surcharge system could result in the loss of staff benefits or all-out closures. SB 1524’s rules allowing such surcharges could affect tens of thousands of restaurants throughout the state.
“We’re the most regulated of any business out there, and we are struggling to survive in the broken system that has been handed to us throughout many, many decades,” said Eddie Navarrette, a co-founder of the Independent Hospitality Coalition, a restaurant advocacy group. “When you add more regulations, whatever it may be, it makes things more difficult. Things are already difficult … there is a mass exodus of our small-restaurant community. I think it’s a huge relief, just to have one less thing being thrown at them right now.”
Navarrette spent weeks campaigning for SB 1524’s passage, writing letters, meeting with upwards of 35 policy advisors, legislators or their representatives, knocking on doors at the state Capitol, and explaining the usage of service fees within the restaurant industry, whose tip-based employee earnings make it different from most fields that will be affected by SB 478.
Surcharges, health fees and service charges are regularly used within the industry to stabilize wages across dining rooms and kitchens — where servers often receive tips but cooks and dishwashers do not — and to help offset the cost of benefits such as healthcare. Businesses with larger service fees, such as 18% or 20%, often note that tips are not expected.
“It’s confusing why the restaurants are claiming that they need to do things differently, because it just feels like they’re saying that they need to hide the cost of their food for us, and that doesn’t feel right,” said Jenn Engstrom, state director of the California affiliate of the Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) a nonprofit organization that advocates for consumer interests and protections.
“It feels like you’re being duped,” she said. “That’s what it feels like: that they’re trying to trick you.”
Some local restaurants have come under fire on accusations of misusing service fees or other surcharges, though multiple chefs and restaurateurs told The Times that these “bad actors” are few and far between.
“Every restaurateur that I know who cares in this industry is using it in a way that is so immensely appropriate and responsible and forward-thinking that if it was to go away, it would be really crippling to everybody,” Kato restaurateur Ryan Bailey told The Times earlier this year.
The new bill, which passed unanimously in the state Assembly and Senate in late June, was co-written by Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) — who also co-wrote SB 478 — as well as Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Assemblymembers Matt Haney (D-San Francisco), Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino) and Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters).
It is supported by the California Restaurant Assn. and the labor union Unite Here, both of which represent thousands of hospitality workers in California.
SB 1524 “will enable restaurants to continue to support increased pay equity and to make contributions to worker health care and other employee benefits,” Matthew Sutton of the California Restaurant Assn. said in a statement. “And, importantly, consumers will remain empowered to make informed choices about where they choose to dine out.”
While some restaurateurs and bar operators are breathing a sigh of relief over the continuation of service fees, others are frustrated with the government’s quick change in tack.
In April, ahead of SB 478’s July 1 start date — but before the new carve-out for restaurants and bars — L&E Oyster Bar and sibling restaurant El Condor rolled their 4% service fees into listed menu prices.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Following the attorney general’s guidance for SB 478, in April restaurateur Dustin Lancaster rolled a 4% surcharge into the menu list prices of two of his L.A. restaurants, L&E Oyster Bar and El Condor. He said that SB 1524 would not prompt him to revert to a service-fee model, at least for the foreseeable future, and that it wasn’t “so simple to just unbake the cake.”
“This is, sadly, all too familiar territory for restaurants in California,” Lancaster told the L.A. Times this week. “Just like in COVID, they jerk us around and expect us to pivot and change our model repeatedly as if it’s no big deal to small businesses. Restaurants continue to shutter [at] an alarming rate in L.A., and this sort of unnecessary about-face is why California continues to be the least small-business-friendly state in America.”
At Bell’s, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Santa Barbara County’s Los Alamos, owners diligently tracked the progress of both state Senate bills and awaited final word before determining whether to remove their 20% service charge, which benefits all nonmanagerial staff.
And even before SB 1524’s passage, Bell’s listed the charge on its the lunch and dinner menus, on its web page for frequently asked questions, and on its homepage section on takeout orders. The new law will allow the restaurant to continue its practice without reconfiguring its business model.
Greg Ryan, an owner of Bell’s, told The Times that he had been listening to and was understanding of customers, legislators and his team, and that he wanted to do what was best for his staff.
For months, the practice has felt like a balancing act.
As SB 1524 made its way through California’s Assembly and Senate, outcry on social media and in public forums such as Reddit was swift and vocal, with multiple anonymous posters commenting that to retaliate for the exemption, they would stop leaving tips. Another Reddit user created a spreadsheet that tracks surcharges and service fees in restaurants across the state.
An L.A. restaurateur, speaking anonymously for fear of customer retribution, told The Times that they’d seen an increase in tips of $1, 0% or other low amounts over the course of the month, possibly in response to the 3-4% service fees their restaurant was charging.
“I’m not thrilled with the bill,” CALPIRG’s Engstrom said of SB 1524. “I think it was better when restaurants and bars also had to have really clear upfront pricing, so that consumers could do easy comparison shopping. When I decide to go out to a restaurant with my family, I check the prices first, on the menu, online.”
That SB 1524 requires clear posting of fees is a benefit, she said, but it’s not as strong as SB 478 with the attorney general’s initial guidance that called for rolling service fees into listed prices. Engstrom called SB 478 “a great model bill,” saying she would love to see similar consumer-protection legislation in other states, or federally — without many carve-outs for industries, regardless of how service fees factor into their business plans.
“I think [SB 1524] is unfortunately kind of a step backwards, but it’s still transparent,” she said. “You can still see it; you just have to do the math.”
In 2021, four years after finishing her last jail term and living in transitional housing in Riverside County, Erica Smith was ready for a permanent home.
She’d saved enough to cover a security deposit and the first and last month’s rent for an apartment for her and her daughter. But after three months of searching, Smith ran out of money, having burned through $10,000 on stays in motel rooms. She’d never found a place to live.
Smith had a series of drug-related and theft convictions on her record. Numerous cities within Riverside had adopted laws called crime-free housing that aimed to prohibit landlords from renting to tenants with criminal histories.
“It’s just terrible,” said Smith, 54. “Why am I not able to provide a place for me and my daughter to live?”
Soon, Smith will have more opportunities for housing, courtesy of a new state law. Assembly Bill 1418, which takes effect Jan. 1, will ban local governments across California from enforcing crime-free housing policies. Not only do crime-free housing rules stop landlords from renting to those with prior convictions, but many also call for the eviction of tenants based on arrests or contact with law enforcement.
Dozens of cities and counties in California began implementing the laws during the wave of “tough on crime” measures in the 1990s, with local elected officials, police and prosecutors contending they helped keep neighborhoods safe.
Under AB 1418, local governments will no longer be able to mandate landlords evict and exclude tenants for alleged or prior criminal conduct. It does not prevent landlords from initiating nuisance-related evictions and screening prospective residents based on criminal histories of their own accord.
More than 100 cities passed crime-free housing policies between 1995 and 2020, covering potentially 4.5 million renters, according to a new report by Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based nonpartisan research institution.
The study found that contrary to proponents’ claims, crime-free housing did not lower crime rates.
“Our overall finding is crime-free housing policies are completely ineffective,” said Max Griswold, an assistant policy researcher at Rand and the study’s lead author.
In contrast, the analysis determined that the rules increased eviction rates on average by about 20%, an effect Griswold called “unexpectedly large.” The study found that cities with crime-free housing policies have a larger percentage of Black residents than those without.
“They’re creating more segregation,” Griswold said of the rules. “At the end of the day, that seems to be their purpose.”
Momentum to curtail crime-free housing laws has grown in recent years.
A 2020 Times investigation found the policies had disproportionately affected Black and Latino renters in California. Last year, the city of Hesperia and San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department agreed to pay $1 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice alleging crime-free housing policies targeted Black and Latino residents for removal.
Citing The Times’ story and the Hesperia case, Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Hawthorne) introduced AB 1418 in February. Soon after, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta issued formal guidance to local governments urging them to reconsider their programs on racial justice grounds.
“Doing that on the heels of the big Hesperia case put cities on notice that the walls were closing in on them,” said Anya Lawler, a lobbyist representing the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation and the National Housing Law Project, two nonprofits that are principal supporters of the bill.
Over the summer, California’s Reparations Task Force, in its recommendations for remedying the legacies of slavery and other more modern government-sanctioned policies that discriminated against Black residents,called for repealing crime-free housing laws.
AB 1418 attracted no formal opposition. It passed both houses of the Legislature without a dissenting vote in a committee or on the Assembly or Senate floors. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1418 in October.
Among the new law’s backers is the California Apartment Assn., the state’s largest landlord organization, which contended that local governments shouldn’t require landlords to exclude or evict tenants.
As AB 1418 made its way through the Legislature, the two largest cities in the Inland Empire, Riverside and San Bernardino, agreed to repeal their crime-free housing laws. San Bernardino did so as part of a settlement challenging the policy in a case filed by legal aid groups, and joined by Bonta’s and Newsom’s offices, on behalf of low-income residents in the city.
At a hearing on the policy in August, Michael Griggs told San Bernardino City Council members that he’d faced hurdle after hurdle trying to find housing. Griggs served six years in prison for robbery and assault charges related to a crime he committed as a teenager and was released in 2015.
Michael Griggs, 34, is pursuing a master’s in social work at Cal State San Bernardino. Because of his criminal history, he struggled for six months to find housing in the Inland Empire before finding a place.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
While incarcerated, Griggs began taking college classes. He earned a scholarship to Pitzer College and now is pursuing a master’s degree in social work at Cal State San Bernardino.
After his acceptance into graduate school in 2022, Griggs said, he spent six months searching for apartments throughout the Inland Empire only to have landlords reject him because of his criminal history. He said he found a place in Highland, a city with a crime-free housing policy about 10 miles from campus, only because the landlord’s background check did not extend to convictions that occurred longer than seven years prior.
“People want to move forward with their life,” said Griggs, 34. “How can they move forward with their life without having the first fundamental thing, which is housing, a safe place to live?”
Griggs said he’s looking forward to AB 1418 erasing crime-free housing policies on a broader scale.
“It’s hard work to do this at the city level,” he said. “I’m happy that the state is stepping up.”
Local officials in Riverside and San Bernardino said they had already scaled back enforcement of crime-free housing programs. Ryan Railsback, a spokesperson for Riverside city police, said the department stopped dedicating an officer to overseeing crime-free housing rules in 2020 because of staffing shortages that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In San Bernardino, the discussions at the state and local levels about potential harms caused by crime-free housing rules led city leaders to reconsider them after three decades on the books, said Jeff Kraus, a city spokesperson.
“The nature of crime has changed,” Kraus said. “The laws have changed. People’s opinions have changed. It’s probably a good time to review them now.”
For Smith, who remains homeless and living in her car with her 12-year-old daughter, AB 1418 represents another chance. She’s protested crime-free housing policies alongside advocacy groups locally and at the state level, and recently obtained a federal Section 8 housing voucher that would subsidize her rent.
Smith has yet to find a landlord that will accept the voucher, but she is counting on that to change.
“I’m excited and quite hopeful that because I’ve been dutiful in opposing these crime-free rules that part of the reward will be that housing for us is coming very soon,” Smith said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is due to debate California Gov. Gavin Newsom later this week about whose state offers a better model for the country, is leading an “assault on free expression in Florida” that is “almost without peer in recent U.S. history,” a watchdog warned in a pair of reports released Tuesday.
Pen America, which defends the rights of authors and others around the world to write and speak out without fear of government reprisals, has written detailed reviews comparing the two states’ recent policies and proposals on campus speech codes, book bans, curriculum fights, diversity and inclusion, internet freedom and other 1st Amendment issues in the interstate feud between DeSantis, a Republican, and Newsom, a Democrat.
The two men, whose states wield outsized influence on the right and left, are set to debate on Fox News Thursday night. DeSantis is hoping the debate jump-starts his flailing presidential campaign while Newsom has been trying to maintain his national stature amid speculation he will run in 2028.
The Pen report finds fault with both states’ policies but reserves its harshest judgment for DeSantis, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination as a culture warrior on the slogan that Florida is the state “where woke goes to die.” The states’ policies have implications beyond their borders; most of the bills the report analyzed have been adopted in other states, and California is home to tech and entertainment industries with global reach.
“Florida is setting an agenda of unprecedented censorship, rigging the system to favor the speech of those in power and silencing dissenting voices,” the Pen report states.
Authors, journalists and others who care about free expression have to pay attention to both states, in part because of their governors’ ambitions and willingness to push barriers at a time when states are leading most of the big culture war fights, said Suzanne Nossel, Pen America’s chief executive, in an interview.
“If you want to see where free speech is headed in this country, you have to take a close look at what they’re doing,” she said.
The report details several bills that have been proposed or passed in the Florida Legislature in recent years, most of which were supported by DeSantis.
They include the well-known bill that critics label “Don’t Say Gay,” which limits discussion of sexual orientation in classrooms, rules limiting the discussion of race in public colleges and universities, bills making it easier to ban books based on parental objections and those targeting mass protests with enhanced criminal penalties and drag shows.
Some of the bills have been blocked by courts, but the report argues that they still represent a threat to free expression because they create an immediate chilling effect, could ultimately withstand court challenges and are already inspiring new laws and proposals in Florida and elsewhere that could accomplish the same goals.
The drag show bill, which broadens the state’s obscenity law to apply to some live performances, was temporarily put on hold by a federal judge in central Florida this month after a restaurant sued.
“Regardless of how the courts rule, the Act has already chilled LGBTQ+ expression in the state,” the Pen authors wrote, citing canceled pride events in southeast Florida and central Florida and the dissolution of a drag storytime chapter in Miami.
DeSantis has accused critics of falsifying his record and creating “political theater,” insisting, for example, that he has expanded African American history requirements in Florida schools, even as the state placed limits on teaching about systemic racism. In the case of the drag show bill, he said it was targeted at “sexually explicit” performances.
“People can do what they want with some of that, but to have minors there, I mean, you’ll have situations where you’ll have like an 8-year-old girl there, where you have these like really explicit shows, and that is just inappropriate,” he said at a May news conference.
James Tager, research director of Pen America and co-author of the reports, said it was important to be “clear-eyed” and “send a warning signal” about Florida’s direction, given DeSantis’ political ambitions.
“Florida holds itself as a blueprint for a more of free way of living, championing the rhetoric of liberty,” Tager said. “Several of their significant proposals, the primary effect is to degrade and winnow down free expression rights in the state.”
Though Florida took the brunt of Pen’s criticism, California’s laws drew more limited scrutiny.
The report credits California with “unambiguous wins for free expression” for passing laws to protect journalists covering protests and restricting the ability of courts to allow rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials.
But it faults the state for what it labels well-intended misses, including a law that requires social media companies to produce regular reports on their content moderation to the state attorney general. The authors argue that the law, though ambiguous in defining the attorney general’s role, could give the government more power to regulate speech.
The report also cautions that a law intended to protect children on social media and other online platforms could chill free speech because it “requires businesses to predict any content or practice that lawmakers could consider to be ‘harmful’” to children. Tech industry and publishing groups have also opposed the law as overly broad, warning it could hinder content intended for adults.
Newsom said when he signed it that the state “will not stand by as social media is weaponized to spread hate and disinformation.”
The report also criticizes the state for a policy approved last year by the Board of Governors of California’s community college system that would evaluate college professors, in part, on their commitment to teaching anti-racist ideas untended to foster “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The policy has drawn a lawsuit from a group of professors.
“There is a difference between protecting a school’s or faculty member’s right to include DEI programming, and mandating that they do so, especially in higher education,” the authors wrote.
The organization labels the policy a “gag order,” arguing that it limits a professor’s academic freedom by forcing them to adopt the college system’s viewpoint.
Wildlife advocates are hailing the passage of Assembly Bill 1322, which expands a moratorium on rat poison, as a win for mountain lions, coyotes and other animals that live in and around urban areas across California.
The new law, also known as the California Ecosystems Protections Act of 2023, will place a moratorium on diphacinone, a first-generation anticoagulant rat poison, developed before 1970. The law will take effect Jan. 1.
Mountain lions, coyotes and other animals are often the unintended victims of the poison when they eat smaller animals, like squirrels, possum or raccoons that have consumed the rat poison. Diphacinone is often used to kill rats, squirrels and other rodents.
The new legislation is an expansion of a similar bill passed in 2020, which placed a moratorium on second-generation rodenticides, those developed after 1970.
Los Angeles’ beloved mountain lion P-22, which was euthanized last year after suffering a number of health issues and injuries after the animal was hit by a car, was exposed to rat poison in 2014 and was suffering from mange, a parasitic infection. The mountain lion’s illness spurred action in the California Legislature that led to the first moratorium on rat poison in 2020.
Despite the 2020 legislation, the Center for Biological Diversity said that “wildlife continues to be exposed to rodenticide and suffer from illnesses and death due to unintended poisoning.”
Diphacinone has been prevalent for so long because “it kills, not just rodents, but larger animals up the food chain,” said Tony Tucci co-founder of Citizens for Los Angeles Wildlife, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that works to restore the habitat of wildlife.
“This bill not only had strong support in the state Legislature, it also had support from local municipalities like Los Angeles County, and we are thrilled that policymakers are understanding that poisoning the predators of rodents through secondary exposure is counterproductive, killing nature’s predators in the wild will ultimately result in more rodents,” Tucci said.
Los Angeles County approved a motion earlier this year asking the state of California to ban first-generation anticoagulant rodenticides.
Rat poisoning products are readily available on the consumer market as ready-to-bait stations that contain that contain rodenticides, including diphacinone, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Poison Free Malibu, a wildlife-protection activist group, was pleased by the passage of Assembly Bill 1322 but said there is still work to be done on other pesticides.
“We are still concerned about other poisons, which are coming to the fore now that the anticoagulants are being restricted,” said Kian and Joel Schulman, founding members of the group.
They suggest using alternative solutions to rid pests, such as trash control, sanitation and making sure buildings are properly sealed to prevent rodents from entering.
You may not be aware of this, but you can read everything that your doctor writes about you. Go to your patient portal online, click around until you land on notes from your past visits, and read away. This is a recent development, and a big one. Previously, you always had the right to request your medical record from your care providers—an often expensive and sometimes fruitless process—but in April 2021, a new federal rule went into effect, mandating that patients have the legal right to freely and electronically access most kinds of notes written about them by their doctors.
If you’ve never heard of “open notes,” as this new law is informally called, you’re not the only one. Doctors say that the majority of their patients have no clue. (This certainly has been the case for all of the friends and family I’ve asked.) If you do know about the law, you likely know a lot about it. That’s typically because you’re a doctor—one who now has to navigate a new era of transparency in medicine—or you’re someone who knows a doctor, or you’re a patient who has become intricately familiar with this country’s health system for one reason or another.
When open notes went into effect, the change was lauded by advocates as part of a greater push toward patient autonomy and away from medical gatekeeping. Previously, hospitals could charge up to hundreds of dollars to release records, if they released them at all. Many doctors, meanwhile, have been far from thrilled about open notes. They’ve argued that this rule will introduce more challenges than benefits for both patients and themselves. At worst, some have fretted, the law will damage people’s trust of doctors and make everyone’s lives worse.
A year and a half in, however, open notes don’t seem to have done too much of anything. So far, they have neither revolutionized patient care nor sunk America’s medical establishment. Instead, doctors say, open notes have barely shifted the clinical experience at all. Few individual practitioners have been advertising the change, and few patients are seeking it out on their own. We’ve been left with a partially implemented system and a big unresolved question: How much, really, should you want to read what your doctor is writing about you?
The debate about open notes can be boiled down to a matter of practicality versus idealism. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, doctor or otherwise, who argues against transparency for patients in principle. At the same time, few people I spoke with for this article believe that the new rule has been put in place all that smoothly. For care providers, the primary concern has been the trouble that can come with writing notes for a new audience. Notes, generally scribbled in shorthand incomprehensible to the unknowing eye, have traditionally served doctors, and doctors alone. They allowed physicians to stay up to date on their patients and share information with colleagues for input on cases.
Some doctors told me they worry that open notes could result in distress for patients who read something they don’t understand, and that highly technical language could make something sound worse than it is. Oncology, for instance, can involve an onslaught of potentially concerning terminology. (Psychotherapy notes are exempt from the new rule.) Other doctors fear that valuable information can be lost if they go too far in de-jargonizing notes to make them patient-friendly. Or that de-jargonizing notes is simply unfeasible. “Let’s say you came to me with pain and pointed to your mid-clavicular line. I’d just put ‘MCL,’” says Aldo Peixoto, a nephrologist at Yale. “But if I were writing for you to understand, I’d have to say ‘pain on the top-right portion of her abdomen in the line that runs from the middle of her clavicle,’ and so on. Rather than writing four lines of prose, I could’ve used literally three letters.”
If that sounds quibbling, consider the trade-offs. Less time for doctors can translate into less time for patients. Many clinicians already write notes well into the evening. Certainly, the pandemic hasn’t helped. Some doctors told me that if they find themselves in a dilemma of either writing notes in less-efficient, plain language or fielding worried patient calls and messages, exhausted practitioners will face yet another burden. And then there’s the matter of trust. Jack Resneck, the president of the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest professional group of doctors and medical students, told me that doctors can need time and space with patients to get them to open up and be receptive to guidance through difficult situations. If these patients were to see notes too soon, Resneck said, they might “immediately flee and not come back to see you.”
As doctors have spent more time dealing with open notes, many have eased off their strongest objections. Some, including Resneck and the AMA, have warmed up to the new rule as certain exceptions have been granted, such as allowing doctors whose patients have parents or partners with access to their notes to omit certain details from their write-ups for privacy reasons. Other physicians seem to be coming to a somewhat awkward realization: On a practical level, many concerns about how this change affects patients are irrelevant, because most patients don’t yet know they have instant access to their notes in the first place. Every doctor I spoke with for this story told me that their patients were largely unaware. Many doctors and hospitals are not going out of their way to inform people about the new rule, so unless patients are particularly on top of shifting rules within our convoluted health-care system, they’re unlikely to encounter the notes on their own. Kerin Adelson, an oncologist at Yale, admitted she didn’t know how to find notes in her own patient portal. She spent several minutes with me on the phone fumbling through different tabs to locate them.
Fans of open notes are frustrated that there is not a greater push for awareness. Even acknowledging that the new system has its shortcomings, many argue that the only way to make things better is to get people invested in the access they’ve recently been granted. Lydia Dugdale, a primary-care doctor at Columbia University, worries about ensuring equity. “Things like socioeconomic status, education, literacy: All of those issues affect the degree to which any given patient is going to want to read and correct and interrogate his or her health record,” she told me. Tom Delbanco, a Harvard doctor and one of the co-founders of OpenNotes, an initiative that spearheaded the push for access to doctors’ notes in the U.S., believes that the effort required to refrain from using “bad words” in notes is minor, and that it shouldn’t make any significant demands on clinicians’ schedules. Doctors who are now taking more time to write notes because of the change, he told me, “probably ought to because they’ve been writing lousy notes.”
Open notes can be valuable for people with chronic conditions and their caregivers, who need to stay in the know. Liz Salmi, the communications and patient-initiatives director at OpenNotes, told me about pulling her full medical record eight years into dealing with brain cancer, before notes were easily and freely available. The document was 4,839 pages. To get a PDF, she said, she had to pay $15 for each DVD it was uploaded to, and her records spanned multiple discs. But the information was worth it: Having access to the record gave Salmi a way to remember all of the crucial bits of information she’d gotten piecemeal from various doctors.
The fact that many people have no idea open notes exist doesn’t change the deeply personal questions at stake in the debate about whether the notes do more good or harm—questions that everyone must confront in one way or another in dealing with America’s medical system, whether or not they fully realize it. How much information do you truly want about your health, and how much do you trust your doctor to deliver it to you? What is a doctor’s role in informing people about their health?
Open notes are only part of this conversation. The new law also requires that test results be made immediately available to patients, meaning that patients might see their health information before their physician does. Although this is fine for the majority of tests, problems arise when results are harbingers of more complex, or just bad, news. Doctors I spoke with shared that some of their patients have suffered trauma from learning about their melanoma or pancreatic cancer or their child’s leukemia from an electronic message in the middle of the night, with no doctor to call and talk through the seriousness of that result with. This was the case for Tara Daniels, a digital-marketing consultant who lives near Boston. She’s had leukemia three times, and learned about the third via a late-night notification from her patient portal. Daniels appreciates the convenience of open notes, which help her keep track of her interactions with various doctors. But, she told me, when it comes to instant results, “I still hold a lot of resentment over the fact that I found out from test results, that I had to figure it out myself, before my doctor was able to tell me.”
As Americans continue to age, get sick, and navigate the health-care system, many of us may become more invested in the idea of open notes. Until they play a more widespread role in people’s lives, however, the most pressing question about whether you truly want instant access to all your medical information might be how it affects your doctor’s life. Many physicians have come around to open notes, or at least have realized that allowing patients to see what has been written about them is not always a huge bother. But the bigger question of just how quickly patients should be able to access medical information, and how soon doctors should be available to help patients process it, continues to plague physicians. The advent of immediate data sharing “has been a major problem in terms of physician quality of life, and that’s eroded across the board,” Peixoto told me. “Doctors don’t want to be connected all the time. They actually have their lives.”
Where we have landed, then, is an in-between. Patients can read their doctor’s notes and view test results at any hour of the day, but we can access our providers only at certain times. There is likely room for refinement. Allowing a patient to select whether they receive test results from their physician or their portal, or see notes only after their doctor has had the opportunity to walk them through the terminology used, for instance, could make all the difference, some doctors told me. For now, it’s worth asking yourself whether you want to access your patient portal alone, or want to wait until you can get your doctor on the line.
