Underwear for firefighters means to prevent cancer

The Defender Brief by 9 Alarm Apparel

A Massachusetts textile maker has teamed with firefighters to make cancer-preventive underwear.

In October 2021, I shared John Oliver's Last Week treatment of PFAS, the highly carcinogenic chemical that is used to make non-stick cookware, as depicted in the movie-based-on-a-true-story Dark Waters, and which can now be detected in the blood of most Americans.

At that time, Oliver lamented that PFAS is not even on the list of toxins that water quality tests look for. Indeed, as I stated in an update to that post the same month, I sought my water quality report at home in Providence, Rhode Island, and there was no mention of PFAS.

There has been progress since. Both the U.S. EPA and the European Union are moving forward with plans announced in 2021 to regulate PFAS. (But see Tom Perkins, US Water Likely Contains More "Forever Chemicals" Than EPA Tests Show, Guardian, July 6, 2022.)

In my house, we replaced our Teflon-coated cookware with a Rachel Ray set we hope is PFAS-free. I took the Teflon stuff to metal recycling, but probably, I acknowledge, it will contribute to the problem in the short term, as landfill waste is leeching PFAS into the earth.

There's a long way to go. In late June, NPR reported, "the EPA put out a new advisory warning that even tiny amounts of some of PFAS chemicals found in drinking water may pose risks." And "[s]cientists are finding PFAS everywhere." A so-called "forever chemical," PFAS persists in the environment, practically never breaking down.

Firefighters are especially vulnerable to PFAS exposure, and testicular cancer is an especial risk. Reminiscent of once seemingly miraculous asbestos, PFAS is used in fire-suppressive gear as well as the firefighting foam in which firefighters can find themselves literally swamped. Firefighters filed a wave of lawsuits in February, CBS News reported, claiming cancer resulting from PFAS exposure.

In a welcome sliver-of-hope development, Massachusetts textile makers announced in tandem with the February lawsuits the sale of PFAS-protective underwear for firefighters.

Precision Sportwear is making "Defender Briefs," a product created by Northampton, Mass., firefighter Levi Bousquet and his company, 9 Alarm Apparel. They told WBZ that Defender Briefs "block 99% of cancer-causing agents from reaching the skin." Precision is located in Fall River, Mass., and 9 Alarm Apparel in Belchertown, Mass.

9 Alarm is marketing the underwear with the slogan, "Protect the Boys."

Family in fatal police shooting demands transparency

Fall River Police Department
Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel (CC BY-SA 4.0)

At a rally in Fall River, Mass., on January 15, the family of Anthony Harden, who was killed by police in November, demanded transparency in the investigation into the shooting.

News reports state that Harden, 30, became involved in a physical altercation with two police officers trying to arrest him at his home.  Harden was confined to the home with a GPS bracelet while charges were pending in an assault case, WBZ reported in December.  According to police, Harden repeatedly stabbed at one of the officers with a metal object, possibly a steak knife, and the other officer shot and killed him.

Bristol County District Attorney (DA) Thomas M. Quinn III investigated and announced in December that police had complied with the department use-of-force policy, WBZ reported.  But the family has not yet seen the full record of the investigation, the Fall River Herald News reported after the "Justice for Anthony" rally on Saturday, and the family alleges inconsistencies between a private autopsy and the DA's conclusion.

In light of the police accountability movement that erupted in recent years in the United States, my Freedom of Information (FOI) Law seminar in the fall semester took up law enforcement transparency as a special topic.  Sifting the voluminous writing on police accountability in scholarly, NGO, and popular literature, I found, probably unsurprisingly, that lack of transparency is often a volatile fuel of misunderstanding and vehement distrust between people and police in these matters.  Worse, it doesn't always have to be.

At risk of generalizing to the detriment of the many, many police officers and departments that uphold the law with integrity, there remains the conventional wisdom that police are notorious for resistance to transparency.  My own youthful interest in FOI law was spurred by, and, in fact, a factor in my decision to go to law school in the 1990s was, frustration dealing with the Rockbridge County Sheriff's Office when I was a student journalist in Virginia.  

FOI "audits," occasionally carried out by media and NGOs to test state open records compliance, invariably test police, because a characteristic reluctance to comply with the law, ironically, juxtaposes so sharply with the urgent life and liberty interests of persons subject to police power.  The classic tension in this vein is nicely encapsulated by Amy Sherrill's report on police compliance for a 1999 Arkansas audit.  The piece might as well have been written yesterday; secrecy in policing is a persistent devil.

For my October class, besides some introductory material such as the law enforcement exemption in the federal FOI Act (FOIA) (subpart (b)(7)), after which the states have modeled many statutory open records exemptions, I assigned:

• State ex rel. Standifer v. City of Cleveland, 2021 Ohio 3100 (Ct. App. Sept. 3, 2021);
• Emanuel Powell, Unlawful Silence: St. Louis Families’ Fight for Records After the Killing of a Loved One by Police, 57 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 65 (2020); and
  
• Somebody: Police, The Intercept (Apr. 14, 2020) (podcast ep. 3).

There is so much to unpack on this topic that I had to be judicious.  The Standifer case, arising from an investigation into police violence in Connecticut, frames the subject with First Amendment access implications and the balance between police transparency and the rights of persons named in police records, including police officers themselves.

I can't say enough about the Powell article.  An attorney with ArchCity Defenders, Emanuel Powell related a personal and powerful narrative with a well informed and reasoned call for reform.

The entirety of The Intercept podcast, "Somebody" season, is worth the time.  For this class, I chose the "Police" episode, especially for its audio recordings of a mourning mother, Shapearl Wells, desperately seeking answers in the death of her son, and what she faces with police who are sometimes understanding but more often defensive, guarded, and harsh with her.  The audio medium demonstrates, in a way a cold transcript could not, the communicative disconnect between Wells and police, and the insult, however unintended, of unnecessary opacity upon an already tragic injury.  Somebody was a joint project of the Invisible Institute and comes with, especially useful for secondary school, a 10-unit teaching guide. 

There are some fascinating online clearinghouses on police data, such as NGO Mapping Police Violence and the Invisible Institute's Citizens Police Data Project, the latter focusing on Chicago, having begun as a collaboration with the University of Chicago.  The annual program of the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC) in fall 2021 featured informative sessions on police transparency reform and tracking police misconduct records (latter trailer only).  Tomorrow, I plan to attend virtually a plenary panel of the Communications Law Forum of the American Bar Association, "Racial Injustice Exposed on Camera: Police Transparency and Government Access in a Viral World."

I am open to persuasion on the basis of what I might not know about the investigation into Harden's death.  But on the face of it, I see no reason at this point for withholding investigative records, especially the autopsy.  Law enforcement authorities sometimes fear record release because it might compromise the public's position in seemingly inevitable litigation.  But discovery will bring the evidence to light anyway, and public entities shouldn't get to hold their cards tightly when accountability for lost life is at stake.

It's especially troubling that on the Bristol County DA website, there is, at the time of this writing, not a single mention of Anthony Harden.   The last two press releases from the office, before and after announcement of the conclusion in the Harden investigation, regard sentencing in other matters, touting the DA's success.  The 11-page report on the Harden matter, described by The Herald News, I cannot find online, not at the DA's site, nor from the State Police Detective Unit that conducted the investigation.

So one might understand how the Harden family, and families similarly situation around the country, might worry that the political heads of law enforcement are concerned more with reelection than with justice.  Transparency would not necessarily solve all ills, but it might diffuse tension and enhance public confidence by some measure.

News reports heroicize resistance to robbery, but storeowner's murder counsels common law wisdom

Mahaseth and his wife
(posted to Twitter by Sam Smink, WHDH 7 News)

A man was charged in early November for fatally shooting a Fall River, Mass., convenience store owner.

The murder of Stop N Save owner Lal Kishor Mahaseth in October shocked the Fall River community, near where I live in eastern Rhode Island.  But the circumstances that gave rise to it are all too familiar in Massachusetts south coast cities.

To help my Torts I class wrestle with the interrelated defenses of self, other, and property, I sometimes show a video of a local convenience store owner who fought back against would-be robbers.  When the viewer knows that no one was seriously hurt in the end, the video can be funny, while stirring serious conversation on matters such as tort doctrine, "stand your ground" laws, and the expectations of the social contract in the unique American culture of guns and personal responsibility.

Sadly and oddly, there are many videos from which to choose for this exercise, even limiting the search to nearby New Bedford, Mass.  My favorite video dates to 2012, when owner-operator Nicholas Dawoud turned the tables on assailants at the St. Elias Mini Market.  This story from WJAR has it all: robbery turned to personal threat; the frustrated defender, informed by past offenses, erupted; and other local customers joined the fray.

The tragedy in Fall River layers the problem with an added complexity.  Do news stories that glamorize defending locals incentivize a wrong choice?  Surveillance video in the Fall River case reportedly shows that 54-year-old Mahaseth resisted his armed assailants, at one point throwing a chair at them.  Does citizen frustration with failed policing in stressed economic times justify a different response to the problems of privileging defense?

Historic common law norms favor life over property in all circumstances.  The result is a familiar law school hypothetical with which students often struggle: the rightful owner of property has no privilege to commit personal attack to defend against threatened violence to dispossess, as long as the threat is merely contingent (albeit often unprovably so in real life) on the owner's refusal to surrender.  The theory is that no one will be hurt, and the wronged property owner can resort to assistance by proper authorities.

However, owing to the powerful American ethos of property and personal responsibility, the historic common law result is as likely to be excepted as applied, in practice.  The glamorization of physical defenses of property such as Dawoud's reinforces the incompatibility of the common law logic with many Americans' thinking.

Mahaseth, who was born in Nepal and earned a degree there in education, is survived by his wife and three children, The Herald News reported in October.  Prosecutors charged 37-year-old Nelson F. Coelho with murder, attempted armed and masked robbery, and carrying an illegal firearm, Mass Live reported in November.

[I acknowledge a kind note of Prof. Volokh, who aptly observes that non-deadly force in defense of property is permitted by common law.  I admittedly conflated defense by force at all, as I suggest, or fear, that the nuance is lost on the aggressor who responds violently, and potentially fatally.]

American soccer traces roots to textile mills

In the first pandemic summer, I watched and adored the limited TV series, The English Game, which depicted the birth of modern soccer, or association football, in the context of industrialization and labor organization in the 19th century.

Fall River Rovers, 1917

For Boston.com, sports writer Hayden Bird now reveals a similar heritage for U.S. soccer in the communities of once abundant mills in my current home region, eastern Rhode Island and the Massachusetts south coast.  Bird explains in the piece:

[T]he early 20th century boom in American soccer is intertwined with the textile industry. The exponential growth of mills in the late 19th century (following the decline of the whaling industry) led to large scale immigration as skilled laborers were funneled in....

Answering the call were people who already had textile experience: those from Lancashire and the valley of Clyde. These regions, as historian Roger Allaway points out, “in addition to being the heart of the English textile industry also was the area of England in which association football [soccer] had most taken root among working class people in those same years."

And because of this, "textiles brought immigration and immigration brought football."

Bird's coverage embedded this video, which YouTuber soccermavn describes as "[p]erhaps the oldest extant professional U.S. soccer footage—snippets from the 1924 U.S. Open Cup final, played on March 30, 1924" in St. Louis, where the Vesper Buick hosted the Fall River, Mass., Marksmen.  The Marksmen prevailed 4-2.

The article is Hayden Bird, American Menace: When Fall River Ruled U.S. Soccer, Boston.com (June 21, 2018).  Hat tip @voteunion (Aaron Wazlavek), J.D.  See also Dan Vaughn, The Ghosts of Fall River, Protagonist Soccer (Oct. 29, 2018).