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Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida last night as a ferocious Category 4 storm after gaining strength as it barreled across the Gulf of Mexico. According to Vox’s Benji Jones, the storm and its expected surge have the potential to wreak havoc across the Southeast, but also dump heavy rains onto Appalachia and beyond.  Before summer had even begun, experts were predicting that this year’s hurricane season would be an unusually active one, with as many as 25 named storms churning across the Atlantic Ocean. The ingredients were all there: the uniquely warm ocean temperatures, lessened Atlantic trade winds and wind shear, and the La Niña conditions cooling the waters of the Pacific.  But it’s impossible to look at hurricanes in 2024 without also considering the context of climate change, which has made everything from rains to drought to wildfires more extreme globally, and put more ecosystems and humans in danger in the process. The record-hot waters in the Gulf this summer, for example, have intensified storms like Helene and Beryl, a supercharged hurricane that broke the record for the earliest Category 5 in a season, making them that much more fearsome.  I recently spoke with Umair Irfan, a correspondent at Vox who’s been covering climate, the environment, and environmental policy for a decade, about this hurricane season, what has changed about these massive storms in recent years amid climate change — and what role humans are playing in compounding their impact. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. —Lavanya Ramanathan Tell us how we used to think about hurricanes, in terms of categories and in terms of strength. What’s complicating that thinking now?The main way we categorize hurricanes is by wind speed. Category 1, 2, 3 — those are thresholds defined by how fast the winds from the hurricane are moving. But what we’ve found in recent decades, and with lots of recent experience, is that wind is not the most destructive element of the hurricane. It’s the water.It’s the rainfall, it’s flooding, it’s storm surge. The water is what causes the most property damage, and what also causes the most casualties and the most extensive tolls on human life. Water makes it difficult to get repair crews in and to get ambulances in and to get people out. Flooding is what blocks the roads. It’s a challenge conveying to the public that when you think about water as the big threat rather than wind, you can take different precautions: storm-proofing your house, flood prevention and mitigation, but also taking evacuation orders more seriously.  What should we know about this hurricane season? You’ve written that it’s expected to be an unusually active season.  To form a hurricane, you need a few things to fall into place. You need warm water at the surface of the ocean, at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter, you need limited wind shear in the air above it, and then you need another thing called atmospheric instability, where the layers of the atmosphere start to blend and merge with one another. What that does is it creates an environment where you can have a lot of evaporation, where water can move upward to a very high altitude. That’s the main engine of a hurricane.Hurricanes are a relatively rare phenomenon; we only see a couple dozen every year, whereas we see rainfall just about every day. Major hurricanes — we see maybe three or four. It doesn’t happen very often that all these ingredients align in just the right way.But last year was the hottest year on record, and we had a major El Niño, which is a major pattern in the Pacific Ocean that tends to drive up global average temperatures. So air temperatures were very high, causing the oceans to heat up. The major ingredients were there.  I was in Houston after one of the big storms of this season, Hurricane Beryl, which struck in July. I saw the effects of the storm really taking their toll on the city for days afterward, in ways you wouldn’t necessarily expect. How is our understanding of the impact of hurricanes changing? Houston and Hurricane Beryl are good examples of how the ways we describe hurricanes don’t tend to reflect the risk that they can pose. It’s not simply the wind speed, or the strength, but how vulnerable the area is.  Houston was hit by Hurricane Harvey years ago, which caused immense amounts of record flooding because the storm parked over the city and dropped a lot of rain. But Houston also has very little in the way of zoning. It’s also very flat, and it’s right next to the Gulf Coast, so there was not a lot of infrastructure there to cope with an immense amount of water. The main natural features that would absorb water have been paved over to support development.  And so there are human-level decisions that ended up worsening the impact.  With Beryl, it was also a fast-moving storm, and the wind caused a lot of damage to power lines. One of the utility companies there, Centerpoint, has a backlog of maintenance and there were well-known vulnerabilities. So when you had a major storm, it knocked out a lot of power, but also took a long time to get it back. Meanwhile, Houston had a heat wave, so there was an intense energy demand. The high heat, the not having power, all converged to compound the effects of this disaster.If you look at Beryl as just a Category 1 storm, you might brush it off. But when you look at all these other things going on, you realize this is a much more severe disaster than the category would suggest.  And the impact was far broader, right? Right. Hurricanes tend to lose a lot of energy once they make landfall. But they can still be fairly devastating storms, especially if they move to an area that isn’t prepared for it, and isn’t used to getting a torrential downfall. The remnants of Tropical Storm Debby and Beryl both hit Vermont, and caused a lot of flooding and damage, and actually killed people. There was no place for that water to run off to, the people there are not necessarily well-versed in how to evacuate ahead of a storm, and the waterways, roads, and bridges are not designed to withstand sub-tropical storms.Is this something that we’re seeing more of, or are going to see more of? We see that in general with extreme weather. We had a major heat wave in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago; that was devastating because that’s the area with the least amount of air conditioning in the US. It was harmful for the people there because they’re not acclimated to the heat, and they don’t have the infrastructure to deal with it.We see the same thing with storms. A weaker storm can still be devastating in an area that does not have infrastructure that can withstand rains, or porous areas that can absorb the water. And when an event does occur, there’s more severe rainfall, because as air temperatures warm, the air can hold onto more moisture.  So, while we’re focusing on the extremes, we should look at what’s typical as well, and what’s typical is also changing.  Is there something people can do to protect themselves on an individual level that we’re not already doing?  First, you have to start to rethink your mentality. There’s a pervasive thinking that bad things won’t happen to you. If you go for years at a time without a hurricane or a storm, or your house got flooded, and now it’s been a decade, that memory fades very quickly. But one of the concerns with climate change is that it’s bringing extremes into areas where they haven’t experienced them before. So this is a new process for some. The first step is recognizing and appreciating that you are vulnerable, that bad things can happen but you can in fact prepare for them. The big thing is you want to also get your policymakers thinking about things that can mitigate disasters over time — things like building sea walls in coastal areas, but also thinking about big changes like rethinking where we are allowed to build at all. Are we going to retreat from certain areas? Are we just going to have to give up on oceanfront areas because the risk is too high? These are much more difficult policy questions, but we’re going to have to start grappling with them because now is the best opportunity — not after a disaster.

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Sheriff Chris Swanson of Genesee County, Michigan, speaks at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Listen to the way Democrats talk about guns, violent crime, and the criminal justice system these days, and you’ll notice that things sound different from the way they did in 2020.  That year, following a national protest movement centered around the high-profile police killings of unarmed Black Americans, including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Democrats focused their message on protecting citizens from police abuses and overhauling the criminal justice system, rather than reducing violent crime. But four years later, after a historic spike in gun homicide and an election cycle where Republicans attacked them over the issue, Democrats have found a new message.  Leaders are still talking about ending gun violence — an important issue for their base, given that it’s the core reason that the United States has a homicide rate that is much higher than other comparable countries. They’re also still supportive of police reform, though it has been less prominent as a campaign issue this year.  But now, with Republicans opposing nearly all of their gun control legislation, they’re highlighting their other efforts in crime prevention and public safety, too. “We made the largest investment, Kamala and I, in public safety, ever,” President Joe Biden said at the Democratic National Convention in August, referring to the $10 billion in funding committed through the American Rescue Plan to public safety efforts for cities and states.  Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz touted his administration’s investment in fighting crime as Minnesota governor at the DNC, and Chris Swanson, a sheriff from Genesee County, Michigan, took to the stage to declare that “crime is down and police funding is up,” in a speech that would have been almost unthinkable at the 2020 Democratic convention, when activists and other prominent voices on the left were calling to “defund the police.”  Mayors leading major cities are now highlighting increases in funding and support for programs built around more recent innovations in violence reduction, including community violence intervention and hyperlocal crime reduction programs. “Community safety is a year-round, collaborative effort,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said earlier this year, unveiling a new summer safety program for the city, which has seen a major drop in gun homicides in 2024 compared to the previous year. “Our comprehensive approach to reducing gun violence is working,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said, crediting the work of the city’s group violence reduction strategy in contributing to the city’s largest year-over-year reduction in murders last year. It’s not just that Democrats are responding to the rise in gun homicides in 2020 and 2021 and the political backlash that came with it. The change reflects a broader shift in thinking among Democrats and their nonpartisan allies who work in violence reduction, criminal justice, and police reform. It’s one that acknowledges the seriousness of preventing and reducing violent crime — the core concern of the “tough on crime” crowd — without accepting the idea that the solution is mass incarceration. There is a growing sense that increasing public safety, ending gun violence, and reducing mass incarceration, rather than being separate or even in tension, are pieces of the same pie, and that efforts to improve one should help improve the others. “These conversations had been occurring in siloes,” between policymakers focused on public safety and policymakers and activists focused on criminal justice reform, says Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice. But the conversations have been merging and becoming more interconnected as they’ve come to an important realization: “We’re not going to solve or dramatically reduce incarceration rate unless we dramatically reduce the rate of community violence,” Gelb says.  The change represents an evolution of years of policymaking on crime reduction and prevention. In the 1960s and 1970s, when murder and violent crime rose dramatically in the United States, a sociologist looked at the available research about what could rehabilitate those convicted of crimes and came up with an unsettling conclusion: nothing worked.  This notion gave credence to a controversial new argument, outlined by American political theorist James Q. Wilson in his 1975 book Thinking About Crime. Wilson argued that since rehabilitation was essentially futile, the criminal justice system should focus on doing what they could to make sure repeat offenders were removed from society. Wilson’s views became popular among policymakers, and the American prison population began to grow in the 1970s, through the crack epidemic and the “war on drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s.  By 2009, the United States had 1.6 million people in prison and the highest incarceration rate in the world. The social science researchers, meanwhile, had improved their ability to study the impact of various violence reduction strategies, and discovered something else important: deterrence based on issuing harsh prison sentences also didn’t work. At the same time, a growing movement recognized America’s mass incarceration issue as a real problem in and of itself — one that cost the government billions annually, exacerbated racial inequality, and devastated communities and families.  As researchers deepened the body of existing research on racial bias in the criminal justice system, and activists organized to press lawmakers for change, a series of police killings of Black Americans brought the issue into the public’s view. By 2020, the movement for police and criminal justice reform had already made important progress, thanks to a network of organizers and activists, and funding from foundations and bipartisan coalitions. That support had helped build momentum for drug sentencing reform during President Barack Obama’s administration as well as his administration’s creation of a task force aimed at police reform.  Those efforts helped pave the way for the most significant sentencing reform bill in years, the First Step Act, signed by President Donald Trump. The bill gave judges more flexibility to avoid lengthy sentences dictated by federal mandatory minimums, allowed incarcerated people to earn time credits that could move up their release date if they participated in rehabilitative programs, and made retroactive the earlier reform passed under the Obama administration, eliminating the sentencing disparity between those convicted of possessing crack versus powdered cocaine. By the last election cycle, the Democrats’ platform included the most progressive police reform agenda in modern American history. The bill focused on greater accountability for police, but also included proposals to invest more in community-based violence reduction. But as reformers were making strides, violent crime began to rise again in cities, due to a number of factors related to the pandemic, policing after the George Floyd protests, and the ubiquity of guns.   By the end of 2020, the country had seen the largest increase in its homicide rate in nearly a century, and the problem got more difficult to ignore. The following year, homicides remained high. Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans increasingly pointed their fingers at Democrats running big cities, arguing that their policies were responsible for rising violent crime and attempting to connect them with the left’s “defund the police” movement.  By 2022, six in 10 registered voters listed crime as a “very important” issue for them in the midterm election cycle that November.  Then, a new crop of Democrats, responding to voters’ concerns, launched campaigns for mayor across the United States. Many made violent crime reduction their primary campaign issue.  Some, like New York’s Eric Adams, who won in 2021, and Philadelphia’s Cherelle Parker, who won in 2023, campaigned on more funding and support for police. (Federal prosecutors announced Thursday that they had indicted Adams on federal corruption charges, and the NYPD has been under heavy scrutiny for illegal stops on citizens, a recent subway shooting, and a separate investigation that resulted in the police commissioner’s resignation in September.) Others, like Wu and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, have focused their efforts on outreach and intervention programs, and focused on investing in community partnerships.  The details of each city’s violence prevention program are different, but the broad elements are largely the same: They include more funding for both the police and for community organizations aimed at addressing the people and places most likely to suffer from high rates of violent crime, especially gun homicide. “Democratic politicians are being responsive to what voters care about,” says Jens Ludwig, professor and director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab.  That’s not the only factor at play. Post-pandemic, Ludwig says, many cities were facing the challenges brought on by the emptying of cities and the rise of remote work, along with the rise in violent crime. Some feared this would result in an “urban doom loop” where people fled cities for the suburbs, making the problems worse and subsequently causing more people to flee. The stimulus funds from the federal government helped stave off the decline, but cities knew that the money wouldn’t last forever.  “Every big city in the country now realizes that they aren’t going to be able to throw money at this problem forever,” Ludwig says. “There’s a need to figure out how to do more with less.”  Investing in targeted initiatives that place community outreach workers in high-risk neighborhoods, or give police data to approach crime hotspots, are ultimately cost-effective methods to reduce violence. “These things are not super expensive in the grand scheme of things,” Ludwig says, and they give cities a way of reducing violence in the short-term while working on longer-term investments meant to address root causes of violence, including racial inequality and economic disinvestment.  It also helps, Ludwig says, that researchers have gotten much better at understanding what works — beyond gun control — to reduce gun violence in the last few decades.  Increasingly, those efforts are being championed by organizations offering resources for mayoral offices looking to reduce violence. Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans, made national headlines for cutting the number of homicides in his city in half during his time in office in the 1990s. Now, as president and CEO of the National Urban League, Morial and the organization are prioritizing community safety and police reform policies, and convening mayors to discuss how to best enact the strategies that have worked in other communities. Focusing on community safety and police reform together makes sense for an organization like the National Urban League, Morial says, which has long focused on advancing economic and living conditions for Black Americans and other underserved people living in urban areas. “Quality of life in Black and brown and urban communities is a paramount issue. A community that feels victimized on the one hand by the police and on the other by crime and crooks is a very difficult community to live in,” he says.  Passing better gun laws still remains a major priority for Democrats. The issue was a large theme of the DNC, with Congresswoman Lucy McBath, whose son was a victim of gun violence, sharing the stage with shooting survivors and others who’d lost loved ones to gun violence. The Democratic Party platform also devoted significant space to solving the problem. On the campaign trail, Harris and Walz, both gun owners, have talked about their support for universal background checks, banning assault weapons, and expanding red flag laws, policies that remain popular with their base. Still, the change in Democratic rhetoric — and in the policies in many cities across the United States — puts Democrats in a much different position than they were in 2022. Something else important happened too: violent crime has fallen. According to data the FBI released this week, overall violent crime fell 3 percent in 2023 over the year before, with murder dropping almost 12 percent. It’s too early to say for certain what role these programs played, and what other factors may have contributed. But the reduction in homicides means more lives were saved — the most important change of all. 

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