California's Sacramento and San Joaquin Delta in the national news this week

Earlier this week, an episode of the New York Times podcast, The Daily, featured Solano County, California's rural reaches, including an area referred to as the Delta and specifically the town called RioVista.  The podcast is about Silicon Valley investors buying up land to build a new city, an enterprise now called California Forever.  I first wrote about the land purchases here and a student wrote this post a few weeks later.  

A day after that episode of The Daily, Here and Now, the syndicated news program by WBUR in Boston, featured a story about how Bay Area (California) artists and makers are moving to the same Delta region, where they find more affordable housing and a surprisingly welcoming community of locals.  

The Daily podcast is mostly an interview with NYT journalist Connor Doughterty, who broke the story about who was behind the land purchases in rural Solano County.  The reason I want to feature this podcast is to showcase the descriptions of rural people and their lifestyle, including their attachment to place, though that has little to do with what is suggested by the story's headline, "The Billionaires' Secret Plan to Solve California's Housing Crisis."  Here are some examples of what drew me to share the podcast, beginning with this description of the place the billionaires have been buying up: 

[I]magine you’re in San Francisco and you drive north further up into the Bay Area into an area called Solano County. And then you go way east and you end up in this very rural corner of the Bay Area that not a lot of people know about. And it’s over here, in this rural corner of Solano County, where our story takes place.

And it’s these open sort of rolling landscape of yellow hills with almost nothing on it. The largest structures there are wind turbines. And a lot of the families out there are farmers. They farm sheep, feed crops, and cows. And many of the people out there have been there since the 1860s.

This is a place where families stay in the same place for generations and pass the farms down several times. This is a place where not a lot changes, but then, in 2017, something very unusual starts to happen. A company called Flannery Associates, which nobody in the area has ever heard of, starts buying land.

And they buy more the next year, the year after that, the year after that, more and more and more and more, until pretty quickly they’re the biggest landowner in the entire county.  So all these neighbors are at supermarkets, they’re at church, they’re at schools. I mean, this is a place where everyone knows everyone.

They’re all on community boards together. They all talk to each other all the time. They all sort of simultaneously get these offers for their land.

Then there's this: 

[Dougherty:] So they not only want everyone’s farm, they start offering people these incredibly sweetheart deals, which say, OK, well, I’m going to buy your land, but you can stay there for the next decade or two, depending on how old they are. And for all that time, you can collect all the income from this land.

They don’t even want the income of the land. So one thing everyone realizes pretty quickly is, these people are not interested in farming.

Michael Barbaro [host] [LAUGHS]: Because if they wanted to farm, they would kick the farmers off the land they had just bought.

Dougherty:  Or they would want to make money from farming.

Barbaro:  Right.

Dougherty:  They don’t care about the price that reflects the income and they don’t even care about collecting the income. So they very obviously have a plan that has nothing to do with farming. And so the question is, what’s the plan? And who are these people?

The next step is to see if they can pass a local ballot initiative to get approval for California Forever: 

Solano County has a rule that says you can’t build in the rural areas, and that’s because they want to preserve these farms just as they’ve been for generations. So at the start of this year, California Forever filed a proposed ballot initiative that would undo that and pave the way for them to eventually build this city.

California Forever CEO Jan Sramek is now holding town hall meetings to try to convince voters to support the land use change.  Along Interstate 80 from Vallejo to Dixon, both cities in Solano County, one now sees California Forever billboards touting the jobs that will come with the new endeavor--and the annual salaries (in the six figures) associated with those jobs.  

And here's a November, 2023, story by KCRA out of Sacramento touting the first tour of the land Flannery Associates bought.  The report mentions the new community would "include open space, agriculture, solar farms, and habitat conservation." 

Here's another terrific quote from the January story by Doughterty, more appropriately headlined, "The Farmers Had What the Billionaires Wanted":

The truth was that Mr. Sramek wanted to build a city from the ground up, in an agricultural region whose defining feature was how little it had changed.  (emphasis mine)

While the podcast headline suggests that the Silicon Valley billionaires were motivated to help solve the state's housing crisis, I don't think that is accurate.  The plan really comes down to profit--one could even say greed.  The investors would not have gambled, otherwise, on getting the necessary local approval, by referendum, before they are able to begin to execute their plan.  

The images Dougherty shares of the agricultural areas of the California Delta compare and contrast in interesting ways with those in the Jon Kalish story that ran on WBUR's "Here and Now" (initially for KQED in January).  Kalish talks more about the Delta town of Isleton, leading with this: 

The small communities tucked into the San Joaquin River Delta are full of contradictions. Located northeast of the San Francisco Bay Area, much of the area is populated by farmers growing crops like wheat, alfalfa and rice. But, visitors might also stumble upon a circus performed on board a huge boat made to look like an island, a community of free spirits living out of tiny homes plopped down in an RV park, even a woman walking a goose on a leash down the street in town. Needless to say, it can be a quirky place.

Once primarily known for farming, Delta communities are changing as people priced out of the Bay Area discover this relatively close region that still offers land and freedom. It has become particularly attractive to artists and other creatives looking to live in a place where they’re free to create without the pressures of city regulators and rising rents. 

“The big question was, ‘Do I stay in the Bay Area, which is getting unsustainably expensive?’” said Michelle Burke, who used to be involved in running American Steel, a sprawling West Oakland artist collective. “My friends are being displaced. They’re losing their workspaces, their art spaces, their homes. It was just unsustainable.”

In Isleton, where Burke relocated, she’s got enough room on her property for six shipping containers to store materials and DIY projects. She’s one of many who have found the Delta to be a refreshing change.

* * *

While the newcomers are visible because of their aesthetic and creative projects, it’s not like people are flooding into these rural communities, he said. In fact, according to Wells, the population numbers have largely stayed the same for a hundred years. Still, some locals distrust the new people.

“The farmers that I talk to are more concerned about that than anybody else,” Wells said. “I think everybody else enjoys some controlled growth. The farmers are concerned because they have farm equipment, and they claim people are coming and stealing crap out of their farmyards.”

Literary Ruralism (Part XXXVIII): Jason Mott's Hell of a Book

Jason Mott's Hell of a Book is just that--in more ways than one.  I'm not surprised it won the National Book Award (2021).  

The most striking thing about the book, most readers would agree, is its insights into race in America, with particular attention to police violence against Black men. 

But another striking thing--at least to me as a ruralist who grew up in a tiny town in the American South--is the role of the small town in the story.  Indeed, more precisely, it is the role that growing up in a small town, Bolton, North Carolina (population 691), plays in the narrative.  Bolton, by the way, is not only the hometown of the novel's protagonist--the narrator telling the story in first person--Bolton is also the hometown of author Jason Mott.  Thus, Mott comes by his insights honestly.  

The book's opening vignette is set in a farm house, but the reader has no idea that this is of any significance until relatively late in the book, when the protagonist reveals his own small-town roots.  The author/protagonist returns there, which gives him an opportunity to comment on the impact of growing up in such a place.  Here are some representative excerpts, all from his return to visit his hometown after he becomes a famous author.  In the first, the narrator is entering Bolton with his agent, Sharon.  This excerpt at least hints at the attachment to place associated with rural America, as well as the major role played by religion:   

[Sharon] scans the small town as we pass. Coming through, we cross paths with nine churches over the course of the town. “Why does a town this small have so many churches?” Sharon asks.

“Because God needs the little people more than he needs anyone,” I say. There’s a knot in my stomach the size of Texas all of a sudden. I haven’t been back to Bolton in years, and with good reason. It’s a town with tendrils. And as soon as those tendrils get into your skin, you can never get rid of them. You can never get away. The truth of the matter is that I’d managed to get out of Bolton only because I snuck away under cover of darkness and something akin to invisibility. I never really fit into this town when I was a kid. I was always too much of something for the other kids I grew up with. I was too much of a bookworm. Too nerdy. Too weird. Too clumsy. Too skinny. Too black of skin. Too white of temperament. I never liked hunting and fishing enough. I never liked fighting or chasing girls enough. I never liked God or hated the devil enough. I never grew things in the garden. I didn’t eat okra and butterbeans. I couldn’t stand dumplings.

My family did the best they could to not make me feel like the freak that I always was. My cousins, God bless ’em, they loved me like I was one of their own even though I’d argue that I didn’t really belong to anyone. Especially after the emergence of my condition [elsewhere revealed as an overactive imagination that causes the narrator not to be able to distinguish between reality and the imaginary].

I can’t say exactly when it began, but I can definitely say that it’s linked to this small town of Bolton and my childhood. From what I remember, I’ve always been living in a different world. My therapist says that can’t be the case, not for the type of condition I’ve got. She swears that what I’ve got comes about only after a person has gone through some sort of trauma. And, typically, when you talk about this type of trauma, it’s got to be something beyond the scope of school bullying and general low self-esteem—both of which I had no shortage of in my youth.

My therapist and I have been through more than a few loops about what might have caused my imagination and persistent daydreaming to work the way it does.

“Can you think of any event that might have occurred?” she asks, over and over again, for the past five years since I’ve started seeing her.

“No,” I reply. “I had a pretty normal childhood. I grew up in a small town that nobody’s heard of in the ass end of North Carolina. Well, now that I think of it, maybe you could count that as a trauma.” (pp. 221-23)

This, too, is quite negative about small-town America, in particular small towns in the American South and how they treat Black folks:

Nestled in the sweaty armpit of Carolina swampland, surrounded by gum trees, and pines, and cedars, and oak, and wild grapevines, the town of Bolton is the land that time forgot. Go back far enough into the town history, and there used to be a railroad stop and a sawmill here. And that was at its pinnacle, somewhere around sixty years ago or so. Back then, the town had a population of maybe around three thousand people.

The main exports of Bolton are lumber and Black manual labor. The wood comes from the forests and swampland—all of which are owned by the local paper mill—and the labor comes from the town’s seven-hundred-odd residents. I wish that I could tell you that something more than those two chief exports comes out of Bolton, but there’s nothing else. Bolton isn’t a town that gives, but neither is it a town that takes. It’s the type of place that keeps to itself. It’s self-sustaining, the way the past always is. And though it changes a little now and again, the way an old piece of metal seems to change colors over the years as some thin patina comes along and begins to grow over it, at its core the town is the same that it has always been. And that’s how the people like it.  (pp. 220-21)

The next excerpt reminds me of the nostalgia associated with rural folks:

“There’s a field like that not far from my house too. Looks almost the exact same. My daddy said that it was where they used to grow cotton a long time ago. My daddy was always talking about the way things used to be back before I was born.”

“That a fact?”

“Yeah. It was like that was all he wanted to talk about. He used to have these books he would read to me on the weekend. These encyclopedias about Black people.” (p. 227)

Then there's this--also about religion--a familiar phenomenon for those who've grown up rural: 

Bolton Town Hall also doubles as a church because there is no separation of church and state in southern Black towns. God is everywhere, especially in the law. At least, He’s supposed to be. But I can tell by the tone and timbre of the people inside the walls of this small, ruined church that they’re beginning to believe less and less in the ability of God to come along and do the right thing in their lives. (p. 242)

This scene reveals both positive and negative associations with rurality in relation to the power and pain of memory: 

And one thing I always forgot is just how much I love the quiet of small towns and the long roads that seem to lead nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. Only a fistful of buildings to speak of. Houses that pop up like memories along the side of pavement and gravel sometimes. It’s a hell of a splendor.

But maybe it’s a good thing that I can’t remember everything the right way. I know what happened to my old man. But the old lady . . . something tells me not to think about that. It’s like the thought of having lost them both is too much to fit in my head so it chooses not to know either way. But there’s a catch to convincing yourself that you don’t know a thing: yeah, it keeps your life on track, but for the thing or person you’re choosing not to see or know, you’re taking away their whole entirety. And ain’t that something to do to a person? To a group of people? Ain’t willful ignorance a hell of a thing?

Being back here in my hometown, I think I can feel that box opening . . . and it terrifies me.  (pp. 253-54)

And then there's this, which shows Mott really knows a thing or two about the practicalities of living in rural America: 

“I wonder if there’s internet out here,” Sharon asks, eyeing the house suspiciously. “How in God’s name do people live like this? It’s barbaric.”

I can’t help but smirk. (p. 226).  

In any event, while the book is not primarily about rurality and the small-town phenomenon, Mott does show off his home-grown observations of rural culture and rural realities--as well as how urbanites (Sharon, the literary agent, is the quintessential city dweller of the northeastern variety) view them.  

The role of rurality in school re-openings amidst the pandemic

Sawsan Morrar and Phillip Reese reported for the Sacramento Bee on Friday that, in California, schools that re-opened sooner rather than later in the middle of the pandemic tended to be in districts where voters supported Donald Trump.  The headline is, "Which districts in California are most likely to have open schools? Here’s what the data shows."  Here's a provocative excerpt: 

REOPENING IN TRUMP COUNTRY

The 10 school districts in the Sacramento region where voters most heavily favored Trump are mostly in rural or exurban areas. They cover much of El Dorado and Placer counties.

Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/article249678058.html#storylink=cpy

Morrar, interviewed me about this, and I'm including just the rural-urban "why" of the article here, though the piece is well worth a read in its entirety:  

URBAN-SUBURBAN-RURAL DIVIDES

Dr. Lisa Pruitt, a UC Davis Law professor who is an expert in the urban/rural divide and income inequality, said partisan school reopenings are no surprise when the pandemic became so polarized along party lines to begin with.

“The red and blue camps have chosen to take different risks, and interpret the scientific data consistent with political polarization,” she said.

Republican states like Texas and Florida lifted many of their COVID-19 safety protocols.

“People do decide what risks they are willing to take, based on their political leanings,” she said. “It’s a matter of which risks you choose to live with.”

But those political leanings can stem from cultural and generational attitudes, and don’t respect salient lines between urban, suburban, and rural areas.

Some people from rural communities tend to be less receptive toward government intervention, Pruitt said, leaning in on a proud history of self-sufficiency.

“Rural places are more static and more traditional,” Pruitt said, adding that people outside of cities have a better sense of their vulnerabilities, accepting hardships — informing their attitude towards the coronavirus pandemic. “When something like the pandemic comes along, some people may say: life is tough, people will die, but we are doing the best we can. In urban places, we are more convinced that we can control our destiny.”

It wasn’t too long ago that places like Folsom were considered exurbs, just further out from suburban neighborhoods. Many people who live outside of the city are just one generation removed from farm life.

“They are more likely to have a rural mindset,” she said. “And that plays out in Folsom, Elk Grove, and Placerville.”

In many school districts, voters were relatively divided between Trump and Biden. Of these 10 districts, eight are back to face-to-face learning and two are distance learning only.

The difference between two "rural" counties in Georgia and the 2020 Election

My big takeaway from this story of two Georgia counties is that one remains more truly rural (culturally and economically) while a contiguous county is more exurban/suburban, with much of that shift having come in the past four years.  Halsten Willis and Griff Witte report for the Washington Post under the headline "In neighboring Georgia counties, election revealed a growing divide that mirrors the nation."  The subhead gets into details on the specific counties and contrasting vote counts:  "President-elect Joe Biden won Newton County, Ga., by 11 points. President Trump won neighboring Jasper by 53."  The dateline is Covington, Georgia, population 13,118, and an excerpt follows:  

Not long ago, Elizabeth Allen and Wanda Cummings were on the same side of America’s political divide.

Both were reliable Republican voters in a reliably conservative part of a reliably red state. But Cummings and Allen have changed, and so has their state, Georgia. They just haven’t changed in the same way.

Allen, a nurse, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan but couldn’t stomach President Trump’s disregard for facts or civility. When she cast a vote for Joe Biden this year — helping him to swell his margins in the fast-growing suburbs of Newton County and claim Georgia’s 16 electoral votes — it was the first time she had ever marked a ballot for a Democrat.

Cummings, a retired antique store owner, moved from Newton and found ideological kinship just across the county line, in rural and ever-redder Jasper. She reluctantly backed Trump in 2016. But after his four years in office, she — and her new county — turned out for the president with gusto.

Allen and Cummings crossed lines that in America today increasingly resemble a chasm. Unlike some previous elections marked by either a blue or a red wave, the 2020 vote featured both. And in many parts of the country, they crested side-by-side, with the turnout and margin for Trump surging next door to areas that boomed for Biden.

And that reminded me of two podcasts I've heard recently, both of which explore the shifting role of exurban voters in the U.S. electorate. The first is the late November episode of the Trillbilly Workers Party and the second is the episode of Densely Speaking, also from late November.  Both are well worth a listen.  

Oprah Magazine feature on rural voters of color

The Oct. 21, 2020 story is by Samantha Vincenty, and it is headlined, "Yes, Rural Voters of Color Exist—and Mónica Ramírez Is Helping Them Head to the Polls."  An excerpt follows:  

Mónica Ramírez knows that rural voters have been something of a media obsession since the 2016 presidential election. She's also well aware that news coverage leading up to November 2020 has continually centered on the concerns of white rural voters. That's due—at least in part—to the story exit poll data told four years ago, in which white rural voters overwhelmingly chose Donald Trump over Hillary Rodham Clinton, even in counties that previously leaned Democratic.

The four years since have brought an avalanche of takes on why that was: Residents felt ignored by the "liberal elite," or have a fundamentally different value system than urbanites, or they'd voted from a place of fear over immigration and race. Whatever the reason, it'd be easy for a casual news reader to conclude that "rural voter" is simply shorthand for "white rural voter"—which implies that any other type doesn't exist.

Ramírez is ready to change that story. As founder of Justice for Migrant Women, the attorney and activist is leading efforts to mobilize an overlooked segment of the 60 million people who live in rural America: A diverse population of women who are Latina, Indigenous and native, Black, and Asian. That includes American farm workers who've labored through a coronavirus pandemic and wildfires to keep planting, picking, and packaging the produce we all eat for dinner.

"I am a rural Latina. I was born, raised, and live in a rural community in Ohio, and I know what the perception is of rural America—that it's white, and male," Ramírez tells OprahMag.com. "The reality is that there are many people of color who live in communities like mine, across the country."

Don't buy the narrative that "rural voters" describes a static, homogenous group. "I think it's dangerous to paint a community of people all with the same brush, because our experiences, our world views, and our priorities really differ," she adds. "Try to put us all in one box, and we're going to miss out on understanding what people need and want."

Don't miss the entire story, which does a great job chipping away at some prevalent myths about rural folks and rural communities.   Here's my own publication about the LatinX population in rural America, outside the so-called gateway states.  

Voting and Attitudes Along the Red Rural–Blue Urban Continuum

That's the headline for a Carsey policy paper, by Kenneth Johnson and Dante Scala, for which the abstract follows:

In attempting to explain the unexpected results of the 2016 presidential election, political analysts have emphasized the differences in party affiliation and social attitudes between Republican (conservative) rural America and Democratic (liberal) urban America. Yet, our study of the 2018 congressional election demonstrates that voting patterns and political attitudes vary across the spectrum of urban and rural areas in the United States. Rural America is not a monolith, nor is urban America. The rural–urban gradient is better represented by a continuum than a dichotomy. At one pole of the continuum are large, densely settled urban cores, where Democrats have consistently been the most successful. At the other end are rural counties far from a metropolitan area, without large towns, where Republican candidates command their greatest support.

This study of the 2018 congressional midterms confirms our earlier analysis of the 2016 presidential election and demonstrates how voting patterns and political attitudes vary across the spectrum of urban and rural areas. Part of the explanation for these differential voting patterns may well rest in the substantial variation from one end of the continuum to the other in social and political attitudes. Just as we found a rural–urban continuum for voting, we also find here that voters at the furthest rural end of the continuum express social and political attitudes far different from their counterparts in the largest urban cores, with suburban residents and those in rural counties with large towns falling in between. A major point of discontinuity along the continuum is evident in the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Residents of these areas tend to vote more like their rural counterparts and share their social and political attitudes.

Small towns in the West obliterated by fire (Part II): New York Times cover story

I wrote a few days ago about three towns destroyed by wildfires in the West, one each in California, Oregon and Washington.  Of course, those three towns are just a few of several that have faced that fate in recent days, including five destroyed in Oregon alone.  Now, the New York Times has a cover story in today's print edition headlined "Western Towns Riven by Grief of Fire Deaths."  The digital headline is "As the West Coast Burns, Communities Unravel with Each Death," Both hint at the lack of anonymity that marks rural places and small town, as does this part of the story by Thomas Fuller and Guilia McDonnell Nieto del Rio.  Wyatt Tofte is a 13-year old who was killed in the Beachie Creek Fire near Salem, Oregon.  

In Scio, Ore., the logging and farming town in the Willamette Valley where Wyatt Tofte went to middle school, a teacher and school administrator went door to door to Wyatt’s classmates on Friday to check on them. The start of school, which will be held remotely, has been delayed by the fires.

In a community like Scio with a population of around 1,000 people and one blinking traffic signal, children grow up together and know one another well.

“Everybody is family in Scio,” Nancy Dickerman, a resident, said.

And the coronavirus pandemic has robbed fire-ravaged communities from being able to grieve as a group. When schools in Scio begin their fall term on Sept. 18, students will be logging in from home.

“The realization will hit the kids when they have to physically go back to school, and he’s not there anymore,” said Margot Cooper, whose daughter was Wyatt’s classmate.

The next part of the story focuses on another teenage fire victim, 16 year old, Josiah Williams, who was killed by the Bear Fire near Berry Creek, California, a Butte County community of about 500 (according to wikipedia, 1,200 according to the New York Times).  In my earlier post about this recent batch of fires, I display some photos I took in Berry Creek in December, 2012.  Here's the NYTimes depiction of the community dynamic: 

Neighbors have grown up knowing one another’s families for years, sometimes decades. When the fires destroyed hundreds of homes, residents in the area jumped in to assist one another.

That reminds me of another rural theme that surfaces in this NYT story:  attachment to place and land.  The Tofte family had lived in the same home for three generations.  

More on the Oregon and Washington fires and their impact on small towns is here.

And here's another New York Times story linking what is happening in public education in California during the pandemic to the wildfires that are also having a big impact on the state's schools and students.   The lede for Dan Levin and Kate Taylor's story follows:  

Ash fell from an apocalyptic orange sky as Jennifer Willin drove home last week from the only school in tiny Berry Creek, Calif., where she had picked up a pair of Wi-Fi hot spots for her daughters’ remote classes. Hours later, her cellphone erupted with an emergency alert: Evacuate immediately.

By the next morning, what one official described as a “massive wall of fire” had swept through the entire Northern California town of about 1,200 people, killing nine residents, including a 16-year-old boy, and destroying the school and almost every home and business.

Ms. Willin and her family escaped to a cramped hotel room 60 miles away. In her panic, she had forgotten to grab masks, but she had the hot spots, along with her daughters’ laptops and school books. On Monday, the two girls plan to meet with their teachers on Zoom, seeking some comfort amid the chaos.

“They’re still able to be in school,” Ms. Willin said, “even though the school burned to the ground.”

Interestingly, none of the Berry Creek teachers live in Berry Creek, so they were not evacuated and are ready to deliver instruction online.  

Black Lives Matter in rural America (Part I): Protests spread to unexpected places, small towns, flyover states

Facebook post about a BLM protest in Vermillion, South Dakota

Anne Helen Petersen, who writes for Buzzfeed and lives in Bozeman, Montana, started this week collecting information on Black Lives Matter protests in "small towns and rural places."  Her initial collection was on her Twitter feed, and I was skeptical off the bat because it included major cities like Portland, Maine (largest city in Maine) and Lexington, Kentucky (second largest city in that state).  But some of the places she was highlighting were more truly rural, and I appreciate the point she is making.

Petersen also wrote a Buzzfeed story headlined "Why the Small Protests in Small Towns Across America Matter." The dateline is Havre, Montana, population 9,310, where the protest was organized by Melody Bernard of the Chippewa Cree from the nearby Rocky Boys Reservation.  Petersen reports that an African American football player for Montana State University-North (but who grew up in Atlanta), Dorian Miles, wrote this encouraging post on his Facebook page after participating in the march:

SPEAK AND YOU WILL BE HEARD! Today we did what had to be done in Havre. A SMALL town of predominantly older white Americans stood with me to protest the wrongdoings at the hands of police EVERYWHERE....Today we stood together for an injustice. Today people who don’t look like me or relate to me showed love and support. I was overwhelmed to see the people I saw today marching in protest to the public lynchings that have been done by the only people whose job is to PROTECT and SERVE their community.

It's a theme you'll see throughout this post:  Defying stereotypes that rural people are consistently  conservative, static, ignorant and racist.

Here are just a few of the places Petersen's Twitter feed has documented as hosting protests.

Twitter screenshot from June 6, 2020
re: BLM protests in East Texas

Benton, Kentucky
Healdsburg, California
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Solvang, California
Alpine, Texas
Taylorville, Illinois
Charlottetown, PEI, Canada
Ridgway, Pennsylvania
Lander, Wyoming
Enterprise, Oregon
Paoli, Pennsylvania
Kalispell, Montana
McCall, Idaho
Merrick, New York
Belfast, Maine
Riverton, Wyoming
Vidor, Texas
Conway, New Hampshire
Palmer, Alaska
Williamstown, Massachusetts
Canton, New York
Emporia, Kansas
Brownsville, Pennsylvania
Huntsville, Texas
Forks, Washington
Spencer, Iowa
Boulder, Utah
Lynchburg, Virginia (home of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University!)
Hoover, Alabama (high school students arrested for violating curfew)
Andrews, Texas
Frostburg, Maryland
Mt. Shasta, California
Edna, Texas
Lewiston, Maine
Moab, Utah
Hazard, Kentucky
Murphy, North Carolina
Mad River Valley, Vermont
LaGrange, Illinois
Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada
Hartwell, Georgia
Avon, Connecticut
Williston, North Dakota

Craig, Colorado

Moses Lake, Washington

Butte, Montana (along with Missoula and Bozeman)

Wolfeboro, New Hampshire

From June 7, Kalispell, Montana

I've seen lots of reporting in the vein of Petersen's, though I believe hers was the first.  Here's a Washington Post opinion piece by Judy Muller about a protest in Norwood, Colorado, where she lives.  The headline is "My tiny, white town just held a protest. We’re not alone." Norwood, population 510, is in San Miguel County, in the southwest part of the state.  

And here's a story by Peter Salter in the Lincoln Journal-Star about protests in Harvard, Nebraska, population 1,013, part of the Hastings Metropolitan Area.   The headline is "'We won’t allow that foolishness in our small town' — In the heart of Nebraska, a peaceful and powerful protest."  Here's an excerpt which, like the Buzzfeed story out of Havre, Montana, features a black football player, one of the only African Americans in the town:

Twitter account out of Nebraska panhandle 

Harvard’s police chief showed up at the protest in short sleeves, because he wasn’t expecting trouble.

“I’m not in favor of any excessive force at all,” Wayne Alley said from the steps of the small city hall. “And I’m for everything that you guys stand for. I wish you the best of luck.”

The town’s only black man was there with a microphone, because he’d started this.

“I woke up that morning and thought we needed to do something,” Jermaine Guinyard said a day later. “Even in small-town Nebraska, we may not deal with police brutality, but we have injustice and inequality to deal with.”

The running back who helped carry Harvard to the six-man football state championship in November was there, too, because Guinyard, his former teacher and coach, needed his help — and his connections.

“My role was putting it out there,” said David Reazola. “Mr. G’s not a social media guy. I have a pretty decent platform. But it was pretty cool how quickly the word spread.”

And that is how an estimated 50 people — many of them students, but some of them families pushing strollers — gathered Tuesday in the center of their small town, in the south-centeral part of the state, to protest the killing of a black man by a Minneapolis police officer, and to call attention to the work that needs to be done in their own community

My friend and colleague Prof. Hannah Haksgaard, who teaches at the University of South Dakota School of Law, shared the image at top of this post from her Facebook feed in Vermillion, South Dakota, population 10,571, home of the University of South Dakota.

Sarah Smarsh (author of Heartland) is also collecting "rural" protests on her Facebook feed and posted some screen shots on Twitter, where she wrote:

I've commented many times on the class lines of political movements. The working poor folks I come from weren't (aren't) civically engaged, not because they didn't care but because, in the hard pursuit of basic survival they had no time to look up from fields and factory lines and retail shelves.   

While many such essential services have not lessened, there is nonetheless a global slowing--of production, of consumption--that, while causing economic loss in one sense, is creating a new wealth of energy in another.  This is true to varying extents for every economic class, albeit amid the energetic payment we will all make to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Smarsh notes that USA Today has been mapping BLM protests, and Petersen mentions in her Twitter feed this story by Reuters.   

Meanwhile, these shots of a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Harrison, Arkansas came across my Twitter feed on Thursday night.  

This left-leaning commentator from
Fayetteville, Arkansas, the
University town two hours away,
observes the perceived politics and
lack of anonymity associated
with rural places.

I know Harrison, population 13,087, very well.  It is the town where I was born, in the regional hospital previously known as the Boone County Hospital and now the North Arkansas Medical Center.  I grew up 20 miles south of there in an even smaller town, Jasper, county seat of Newton County, population 8,000.  Boone County, population 37,000, is 96% White, 2.6% Hispanic or Latino, and 0.4% Black.  This post from several years ago is about Harrison and Boone County's history as an outpost of the KuKluxKlan.

I shared these screenshots with my mom, who has lived in Newton County her whole life, and it was important to her to tell me that "the protest in Harrison is organized by a local person and is not affiliated with organizations that are rioting in more metropolitan places." Like lots of folks--apparently including many police--Mom is struggling to differentiate between peaceful protestors protected by the First Amendment and looters who are committing crimes.  (Don't miss this Codeswitch episode on the "outside agitator," including Martin Luther King, Jr., being labeled as such). My mom's comment also reveals her love for the rural and her rural lifestyle; she's always been sensitive when I have written anything negative about my hometown--however fact-based and newsworthy--on this blog.

In any event, three prior posts about Harrison are here, here and here.

In a similar vein, the Southern Illinoisan published this story, by Molly Parker "In wake of Floyd death, rural, white Southern Illinois towns are reckoning with racist past."  Parker writes:

Some of these communities — Benton, Herrin, Carterville, Anna — were “sundown towns” where, by official policy, black people were not allowed after dark into at least the 1960s in some cases, according to research by James W. Loewen, author of the book “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.”

Kalispell Montana, in the screenshot above, is also a place associated with racism; in particular, white supremacist Richard Spencer is a part-time resident of nearby Whitefish, also in Flathead County, gateway to Glacier National Park.

In short, all of these protests run counter to our expectations of rural folks, just like the women's marches spreading to rural places did in 2017.

But then there have been other types of protests this past week, like this one out of Idaho, where people turned out to turn away a rumored "antifa" protest.  The headline for the Washington Post story by Isaac Stanley-Becker and Tony Romm is "Armed white residents lined Idaho streets amid ‘antifa’ protest fears. The leftist incursion was an online myth."  A similar report from Humboldt County in far northern California is in the Lost Coast Outpost.  And here's a story from the same news outlet about a BLM protest in the city of Fortuna.  

And while "redneck" is non synonymous with "small town" or "rural," it is often conflated with these geographies--and with the South--in the national imaginary.  I therefore share this piece from medium.com by Southern Crossroads headlined "Rednecks for Black Lives."  

This seems like a good opportunity to also share a story from NPR this morning.  Michele Block, reporting on the hundreds of voices singing, Lean on Me in Washington, DC, two days ago, noted that Bill Withers, who wrote and recorded the song, considered it a "rural song."  She explained by playing an interview with Withers who shared an incident when he was in the Navy and returning home to West Virginia from where he was stationed in Florida.  He had a flat tire while driving through rural Alabama and a man who Withers said looked like he could have been out of the movie "Deliverance" came upon him.  In due course, the man walked to his home and returned with a tire for Withers, and even helped him change the tire.  Withers said incidents like that gave him hope, and it gives me hope, too--just like these protests in rural places give me hope.

Postscripts:  Here's an op-ed published in the L.A. Times on June 9 by a high school student Lilian Smith of  C'oeur d'Alene, Idaho:  "My Idaho town shows how the Black Lives Matter movement can resonate in deep red communities."

The Takeaway with Tanzina Vega did a great interview with Anne Helen Petersen re: her writing about rural and small town where Black Lives Matter protests have occurred.  I especially appreciated the attention to the rural concept of "lack of anonymity." 

Here is the Daily Yonder story on the matter.  

On rural whites, in the context of Mississippi politics

The race to fill a U.S. Senate seat from Mississippi has been drawing lots of media attention, in part because it pits a white Republican woman, Cindy Hyde-Smith, against an African-American man, Mike Espy.  The other reason the race is attracting attention is that Cindy Hyde Smith has been--depending on your perspective--either dog-whistling or flat out race-baiting, as she has made comments about, for example, wanting a front-row seat if invited to a public hanging by one of her donors.  To that, Espy, who served as Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton, said the comment was "awful" and called it "tone deaf," though he did not square respond when questioned whether it was racist.  Both Walmart Corporation and Major League Baseball asked Hyde-Smith to return their campaign donations following that episode.  Hyde-Smith has also been recorded making comments about the desirability of suppressing the vote among liberal-leaning college students.  A few days ago, media outlets like USA Today began pointing out that Hyde-Smith attended high school at a "segregation academy," a private school set up to cater to wealthy whites (and even less wealthy ones) lest they be compelled to attend integrated public high schools.  Phil McCausland, reporting for NBC news, explains:

About 200,000 students moved to private schools between the 1960s and 1980s immediately after a series of Supreme Court decisions that began with that 1954 case. Two-thirds of those students came from six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, according to the Southern Education Foundation.

Personally, I blame Hyde-Smith much more for what she has said recently, as an adult, than for the decision her parents made to send her to a segregation academy.  The sins of the parents should not be visited on their children.  That said, her education in such a setting might explain her current views, and her lack of sensitization to issues regarding race and the ugly racial history of the South.   Further, a well-educated woman like Hyde-Smith should have caught up on a more accurate version of U.S. history by now.

The New York Times reported yesterday on this Mississippi race, and I thought some of the observations there were especially interesting regarding the views of "rural whites," a term that is sometimes a proxy for working-class whites.  The headline for Jonathan Martin's story is, "Across South, Democrats Who Speak Boldly Risk Alienating Rural White Voters" and here's part of the lede focusing on Espy's apparent effort not to alienate "rural white" voters:

When Mike Espy ... faced his opponent at a debate ahead of this Tuesday’s runoff election, he had to make a choice: confront Ms. Hyde-Smith over her comments about attending “a public hanging,” which evoked the state’s racist history, or take a milder approach to avoid alienating the conservative-leaning white voters who will most likely decide the election. 

He chose the latter. 

“The world knows what she said, the world knows that those comments were harmful and hurtful,” Mr. Espy said afterward, sounding not entirely convinced.

In a state where politics has long been cleaved by race, Mr. Espy was reckoning with a conundrum that Democrats face across the South — from Mississippi and Alabama, which have been hostile to the party for years, to states like Florida and Georgia that are more hospitable in cities but still challenging in many predominantly white areas. Even as they made gains in the 2018 elections in the suburbs that were once Republican pillars, Democrats are seeing their already weak standing in rural America erode even further.

Comparing Espy's situation to those of Stacy Abrams (Georgia), Andrew Gillum (Florida) and Beto O'Rourke,  Martin notes that "in rural county after rural county, this trio of next-generation Democrats performed worse than President Barack Obama did in 2012."  The Democrats also lost Senate seats and governor's race outside the South, in places like Iowa and Ohio "with more conventional candidates whose strength in cities and upper-income suburbs was not enough to overcome their deficits in less densely populated areas."

The story quotes Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist, saying something I keep hearing in the wake of the mid-term elections:  Democrats don't have to "win" the white working class--they just need to lose them by a smaller margin than they did in 2016 and 2018:

There’s a baseline percent of the white vote you have to get to win and you can’t get to it just through young and progressive excitement. The path from 48 to 50 is like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen.

How do you do that?  Some suggest you have to avoid making white people uncomfortable, and when there's too much focus on race and racism, "rural" whites are put off.  (What are the salient characteristics of "rural" here?  low-education?  traditional?  static?  insular?)   Is it guilt that causes them to be put off?  or "white fragility"?  Espy's avoidance of calling out Hyde-Smith's comments as "racist" seems consistent with this need to coddle whites--not to remind them of this nation's horrific racist past and the legacy of that history.  An anecdote illustrating that can be found here, from this Washington Post story about evangelical Christians in Alabama.  One feared "the racial divide" was getting worse. 

The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”  [See related stories regarding how we teach slavery here, here and here]  

She was suspicious of what she saw as the constant agitation of blacks against whites, the taking down of Confederate memorials and the raising of others, such as the new memorial to the victims of lynching, just up the highway in Montgomery. 

“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne. 

“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?” 

“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila. 

It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives. 

“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”

This also reminds me of a topic I've been preoccupied with in recent years, especially since the election of 2016:  the divide between the chattering classes' understanding of racism (which is very broad) and the much narrower definition of racism associated with less educated folks.  I wrote about it some here.  How are we going to bridge this gap and get white people to be more comfortable with --or at least more willing--to see how they have been beneficiaries of a racist past and that they have a responsibility to denounce that history and take the nation clearly in a different direction.  Surely it's going to include better educating our students (I'm talking public primary and secondary education) about slavery and its aftermath, something our nation has not done effectively.  Read more here and here.

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.  

McClatchy feature on policing in rural California echoes my theorizing of law's relation to rurality

Most Wanted Poster
Trinity County, California, Courthouse, July 2018
Photos by Lisa R. Pruitt 

The headline is "Calling 911 in rural California?  Danger might be close, but the law can be hours away," and four Sacramento Bee journalists contributed to this major feature, which has been in the works since December, 2017.

I was gratified to see the story--which documents the reality (and consequences) of lack of effective law enforcement and high per capita violent crime rates in California's nonmetro counties.  To be clear, the news is bad, but I was gratified in that the story confirms work I have been doing for more than a decade now (some of it documented in this blog since September, 2007, 11 years ago this month).  That work has been theorizing the difference that rurality makes to law's operation and people's attitudes about law.  In other words, what is the legal relevance of rurality and, thus, why should legal scholars attend to rural difference?  why should "rural" be a category of analysis in the implicitly urbanormative field of law?

Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office, Yreka, California, July 2018
photos by Lisa R. Pruitt (c) 2018

Just a few years ago, I published a chapter on this issue in a volume of legal geography essays.  Mine was titled, "The Rural Lawscape: Space Tames Law Tames Space."  My argument was that rural spatiality is in tension with law.  That is, the distance between homes and the distances that legal actors must traverse in order to exert law's authority--to make law meaningful--practically disables law.  Technology can help (that is, time can trump space), but it's costly and cannot always be a substitute for the presence of human law enforcement.  Further, rural residents' sense that they must be self sufficient is reinforced by this lived reality.  As academics express it, society, spatiality and law and all mutually constituting or co-constitutive.  If people know that legal actors such as law enforcement are effectively not present, then they know they must take care of themselves.  In a sense, the lack of efficacy of law promotes a sort of frontier justice or informal order.   

Now, the empirical work of these Bee journalists confirms my theorizing with hard data about the number of sheriffs deputies per 100 square miles in California counties--including those all across the state, not just in the northern third on which Sac Bee usually focuses.  These journalists also look at  violent crime rates, confirming that  many of the highest crime counties are "rural" according to the metric used by the reporters:  Alpine (with a population of just 1,175, the state's least populous county, in the eastern Sierra) and Lassen (in the northern Sierra) lead the pack.  Third is metropolitan San Joaquin County, home to Stockton.

Seal of Plumas County, Quincy, California

Plumas (again, northern Sierra) is next, followed by the state's most urban county, San Francisco, then nonmetro Inyo, Shasta, Lake and Modoc.  Of course with populations as low as those of many of these nonmetro counties, the violent crime count doesn't have to be very high to rise to the top of the per capita heap.  Indeed, it would be interesting to see data on deputy sheriff per 1000 residents vs deputy sheriff per 100 square miles.  How different would the map and rankings look then?  And which is the more salient metric?

The Bee story begins with information about a 2011 double murder in the Trinity County community of Kettenpom, nearer to Mendocino County than to Weaverville, the Trinity County seat.  In that case, Trinity County law enforcement asked the neighbors of a couple who called 911 to check in on that couple because sheriffs deputies coming from Weaverville were several hours away.  The incident ended badly, with the responding neighbors severely wounded and the assailant, who had killed the couple who initially called 911 by the time the responding neighbors arrived, also dead after a car chase.  The responding neighbors, Norma and Jim Gund, are suing the Trinity County Sheriff (in a case now going to the Supreme Court of California) and in the related story by journalist Ryan Sabalow observe, "Over here, we have to take care of ourselves."  Any trust they had in the sheriff's office has disappeared, the story reports.  (The separate story about this law suit is well worth a read, especially for legal eagles who will be interested in the arguments of the respective parties, including the assertion that the Gunds were effectively Posse Comitatus).

Another quote from this McClatchy feature similarly speaks powerfully to informal order.  The man quoted is one whom Modoc County Sheriff's deputies knew was growing marijuana illegally.  Yet when they stopped him in a remote locale, they made an effort to calm his anger rather than confront him with the marijuana infraction.  The story reports that the deputies planned to return later with reinforcements rather than risk the consequences of his ire when they stopped him in a vulnerable location.  The man who was stopped, identified as Roberts, told the reporter who was on a "ride along" with the deputies:

We have freedom with responsibility out here.  We can do a lot of stuff. These guys [sheriffs deputies] referee.

near North San Juan, Nevada County, July 2017 

Wow, law enforcement as referees for what residents want to do?  This is sounding like the wild west, indeed.  (As it happens, I am in the midst of reading about the wild west in Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose, which features vignettes where vigilante justice takes over, much to the dismay of eastern transplants to places like Leadville, Colorado in the 19th century).

Bieber, California (Lassen County), July, 2018

These somewhat harrowing vignettes from Trinity and Modoc County aside, what I consider to be the story's lede contrasts rural with urban:

As urban areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Fresno grapple with discussions about use of force and the over-policing of minority communities, the state’s rural counties face a growing and no-less-serious law enforcement crisis: a severe shortage of staff that puts the public — and deputies — in danger. 

A McClatchy investigation found that large stretches of rural California — where county sheriffs are the predominant law enforcement agencies and towns often run only a few blocks — do not have enough sworn deputies to provide adequate public safety for the communities they serve.

Elsewhere the story provides this illustration, again contrasting rural and urban:

Del Norte Courthouse, Crescent City, July 2018  

While the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department employs nearly 160 deputies for every 100 square miles it covers, the tiny sheriff’s departments in Madera, Mariposa and Mendocino counties employ about four deputies for the same amount of turf. In Del Norte and Alpine, the counties make do with two deputies per 100 square miles.

Those figures include non-patrol personnel and those who work in county jails. 

Also, consider the role that the phenomena of distance and personnel shortage played in this tragic story out of Tehama County last fall.  Perhaps these Rancho Tehama events gave the Bee journalists the idea for this story.

Tehama County Sheriff's Office, Red Bluff, California, July 2018

The McClatchy story features a color-coded map that shows the number of law enforcement officers per 100 square miles (again, what would it look like if deputies per 1000 residents?).  It reminds me of maps I have helped to produce here showing lawyers per capita in California counties.  Guess what? As with law enforcement officials, nonmetro counties have shortages of lawyers.

Another interesting theme/revelation in the story is that no deputy actively patrols in some counties, e.g., Mendocino, for some parts of the night, though deputies are on call from their homes.  When I wrote something similar on Legal Ruralism about my home town in Arkansas a few years ago (see here, here and here), students in my Law and Rural Livelihoods class were shocked to imagine a place with no law enforcement on duty 24-7, yet it is happening here in California, too.

A third interesting theme:  population churn in rural areas, partly driven by low cost of living, has had an impact on how rural communities are policed:

Tex Dowdy, the sheriff-elect of Modoc County, said an influx of transient residents drawn to the low cost of living has made identifying suspects harder for Modoc’s deputies. 

The story quotes Dowdy: 

It isn’t the same place where we used to live.  You used to recognize the bad guy walking around the street because he was in the paper every week.

Alturas, California (Modoc County) July 2018

Note the lack of anonymity theme, about which I have written a great deal in the last decade, including here and here.  The sheriff basically confirmed what I have argued:  in rural counties, the "usual suspects" is as powerful a type of profiling as racial profiling, if not more so (and, of course, the two can overlap).

A fourth interesting theme--one also  articulated in my academic writing--is that some people seek our rurality for the privacy and effective seclusion from law that it provides.  (Think Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, in rural Montana).  These folks are unlikely to call on law enforcement even when they need it.  Regarding this proposition, the story quotes Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal in relation to this phenomenon:

Things go on in the hills all around us that go unreported.  We know that. Daily. It happens. It’s something that we’ve just gotten used to. There are shootings that occur in the middle of the night. ... We know that there’s kidnappings, we know there are people getting brutalized out in the hills, we know there are people getting robbed.

Honsal's quote reminded me of this feature by Reveal last fall, which I blogged about here, regarding wage theft and sexual abuse of "trimmigrants" in places like Humboldt and Trinity County.  Of course, immigration status can also make people reluctant to report a crime, a particular concern in places like the San Joaquin Valley.  The Chief Justice of California has, for that reason, criticized ICE for any presence in California courthouses.

A fifth theme relates to budgets, cuts to which have undermined a prior practice of deputizing people who lived in the remote reaches of a given county:

Until recent years, many rural departments had regional substations and hired “resident deputies” who lived in the remote areas they served. Those resident deputies knew their territories and most of the locals by name, making it harder for crime to go unnoticed, said multiple sheriffs. Resident deputies also allowed for quicker response times. 

Those in need “just come and knock on your door,” said Modoc’s Poindexter. “You just grab your gun belt and go out the door and try to fix it.”

July 2018, Bieber, California (far northern Lassen County),
a sheriff station at the local school, which is closer to Alturas, in Modoc 
County,  than to Susanville, the Lassen County seat.

Indeed, in my recent drive up California 299 from Burney (Shasta County) to Alturas (Modoc County), I saw a sign indicating such a remote outpost of the Lassen County Sheriff's office in Bieber, which is near the Modoc County line and also not far from Shasta County.   Yet it is technically in Lassen County, and how interesting that the Lassen Sheriff's substation should be at the school, of all places. (More photos from that journey are here and here with more to come in future posts on access to justice in rural California).  A few years ago, I also photographed a Siskiyou County Sheriff's substation in Dunsmuir.  Though it is at the southern edge of the county, it is hardly remote given its locale on I-5.

Siskiyou County Sheriff's
Substation, Dunsmuir July 2016

Another aspect of the economic situation is the inability of counties to tax public lands, both federal and state.  The story explains:

The state compensates counties for protected lands, too, but that funding has been controversial and even less predictable. Since the 2015-2016 budget cycle, the state has given rural counties $644,000 for payments in total each year to be divided among them, said state Sen. Mike McGuire, whose coastal district spans seven counties from Marin to the Oregon border.

 * * *  

“You can’t sustain an operating budget not knowing what is coming,” said Justin Caporusso, vice president of external affairs at the Rural County Representatives of California, an advocacy group. 

I have written previously here and here of the constraints that lack of tax revenue on federal lands place on local governments in rural areas, especially in the West, which has a much greater percentage of public lands than the rest of the country.  The impact of shrinking federal dollars on law enforcement in Southern Oregon has attracted media attention in recent years.  As for that state contribution, less than $700K/year spread among seven counties is pretty pitiful,  even in the context of a paltry rural budget. 

Sign on Sierra County Courthouse,
Downieville, California, July 2017

A sixth theme is that the state practice of re-alignment (re: prisons and local jails) has not served nonmetro counties well.  The Bee story includes a few interesting quotes to illustrate the conundrum re-alignment has created for county law enforcement.

Sierra County Courthouse and Jail, Downieveille, July 2017

A seventh theme is the lack of mental health support.

Rural counties have 0.9 psychiatrists for every 10,000 residents, about half the statewide average, according to California Medical Board data. Mariposa has been experimenting with “tele-doc” video technology to connect jail inmates with mental-health professionals in other counties.

Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article215453050.html#storylink=cpy

Of course, telemedicine is being used to provide mental health and other services in rural counties generally, and not only to incarcerated populations.

Weaverville, California (Trinity County) CHP headquarters
is adjacent to the Dept. of Motor Vehicles.  Perhaps this sign
responds to the reality that rural residents are known to
report crime at lower rates than urban residents,
even when the perpetrator is a stranger.

An eighth theme regards reliance on other law enforcement agencies, including not just California Highway Patrol, but also both federal and state game and fish officers.

USDA Forest Service vehicle, Weaverville, California, July 2018 

Back to the budget/economics note, I'll close with this stunning data point:  rookie deputies in Modoc County earn $13/hour!  I assume baristas in Los Angeles are paid better than that, especially if you take into account tips.

Cross-posted to UC Davis Faculty Blog.