“Attorney General Sessions ‘has said his aim is to improve police morale and allow officers to fight violent crime without fear of being shamed or second-guessed.’ The left in this country has no idea how good it is for America’s cops to hear this sentiment expressed from the nation’s top law enforcement officer.”
Several so-called civil rights organizations have recently submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Justice Department. They want information about the Obama administration’s work on ostensive “police reforms.” These groups are also seeking information about the funding and staffing of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the folks primarily responsible for persecuting police agencies during Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama’s pogrom against cops.
President Obama’s DOJ didn’t try to hide its hostility toward our nation’s cops. After all, it nominated Debo P. Adegbile as Holder’s assistant attorney general for civil rights. What were his qualifications to head investigations into multiple law enforcement agencies? Well, he represented convicted cop-killer Wesley Cook (you may know him as Mumia Abu Jamal.) In fact, Town Hall contributor Katie Pavlich described Adegbile’s efforts as “having worked tirelessly to free guilty murderer Abu-Jamal from prison.”
Now, enamored with our system of jurisprudence based on equal justice under the law, I believe every defendant deserves a vigorous defense. If, as a public defense attorney, a judge had assigned me to his case, I would be obligated to have taken it.
Germany is not exactly known for its low-skilled cops, and they sent them here to train with us.
But Mr. Adegbile wasn’t assigned to it. He volunteered to represent a man who admitted to murdering a Philadelphia police officer in the street in front of several witnesses, including his brother who did not testify on Jamal’s behalf.
While Officer Daniel Faulkner was arresting Jamal’s brother, Jamal walked up and shot Faulkner in the back. Then, while the officer was lying in the street, Jamal stood over him and fired four more shots into the helpless man, one in his face. Fortunately, a Democrat-led Congress did not confirm Adegbile to the post.
Sometimes for law enforcement the winds of change waft in on the putrid odor of political social justice. At other times, these change winds come floating in on the sweet scent of equal justice. The former stench was the case when President Obama politicized and weaponized the DOJ, and then used it to attack America’s law enforcement officers. Via Mr. Obama’s DOJ bully-in-chief, Eric Holder (who never met a police department he didn’t think was corrupt), the administration was, sadly, successful in demonizing its own nation’s cops.
First, consider the slant in most reporting on the myriad, bogus federal consent decrees inflicted on the nation’s law enforcement agencies. Take the article written by Washington Post national security reporter Matt Zaptosky: “Civil rights organizations ask for info on Justice Department’s police reform work.” Before I go into the contents of the article, just consider how the title frames the discussion. “Police reform work” is presented as a given, as if the term, reform, holds no controversy. In reality, the issue of police reform is far from settled—it’s controversial and also contentious.
If this assault on the nation’s law enforcement wasn’t a fraud, then why did the DOJ refuse to release the methodology used in its study of the Seattle Police Department’s alleged use of force violations to the city or the public?
Zaptosky writes, “The Justice Department under President Obama was particularly aggressive in promoting police reforms, launching broad probes into police practices at troubled law enforcement agencies across the country, and negotiating court-enforceable agreements to mandate change.” Anything missing from this reporting?
How about context and perspective—or opposing views. This is an editorial masquerading as news. And, writing from the leftist “bubble,” the writer may not even be fully aware he’s doing it. Anyone who reads this “news” article is left with the mistaken sense that President Obama was “promoting [true and necessary] police reforms” and launching probes into “[truly] troubled law enforcement agencies.” This type of reporting assumes that police agencies needed reforms and that they are actually troubled.
While every organization on earth can always improve and will have the proverbial bad apples, at least as long as police departments have to recruit from a hiring pool comprised of human beings, this does not mean law enforcement is broken.
For example, before the DOJ arrived, the Seattle Police Department was one of the most respected and emulated law enforcement agencies in the United States. Other departments actively sought out the SPD to consult on various aspects of law enforcement.
I remember, not too long before the DOJ arrived, I went through my annual advanced Street Skills training with a number of German police officers sent to train in Seattle. Germany is not exactly known for its low-skilled cops, and they sent them here to train with us. After the DOJ’s “investigation,” overnight, the SPD became a law enforcement pariah, humiliated and dishonored by DOJ lies.
Thankfully, our new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is correcting the situation. He’s reminding us that American law enforcement is not generally troubled nor widely in need of reform. I’ll go one step further: he’s attempting to reverse the damage done when the Obama/Holder DOJ fraudulently investigated and then imposed needless federal consent decrees, essentially quasi-federalizing many local police agencies, turning them into social justice laboratories with cops serving as lab rats.
If this assault on the nation’s law enforcement wasn’t a fraud, then why did the DOJ refuse to release the methodology used in its study of the Seattle Police Department’s alleged use of force violations to the city or the public? Shouldn’t disseminating this information have been a part of the process? Otherwise, how is an agency supposed to know it truly has problems that need to be addressed? Shouldn’t an agency need the information so they can repeat the study to prevent further similar situations?
I’ll admit it if I’m wrong, but I’d bet they didn’t release this information to other agencies either.
Why didn’t they release this information? Didn’t the Obama administration tout itself as the “most transparent administration in history?” They didn’t release it because they didn’t want the public to know how they arrived at their absurd results. I’m guessing their “scientific” results may have involved tiny scraps of paper tossed into a hat.
The left doesn’t want the rule of law and equal justice when they benefit from arbitrary law and social justice.
Their data was so ludicrous that a local university criminal justice professor (ironically, a former DOJ statistician and no police apologist) conducted his own more comprehensive study. In an article he wrote that appeared as a special to the Seattle Times, the professor told Seattle to “call the DOJ’s bluff and demand an apology.” Sadly, the city’s cowardly leaders refused to take the professor’s advice, thus sentencing its officers to years of unnecessary humiliation, ridicule, and second-guessing their every action.
You want more evidence of fraud? In a Newsmax.com interview regarding “police reform,” former US Attorney Andy McCarthy said [Obama’s] DOJ “had their thumbs on the scales from the beginning.” The article further describes “McCarthy citing a string of federal civil rights investigations into some 20 police departments, including Ferguson, Missouri’s, which he said the Justice Department has approached with a presumption of racial guilt.”
Not surprisingly, the organizations submitting the FOIA requests include the NAA“L”CP (according to radio host Rush Limbaugh, the inserted “L” represents “liberal” to increase the acronym’s accuracy) and the A“L”CLU (with apologies to Rush, I’ve inserted the “L” here which stands for “leftist”).
While still on edge because so many local jurisdictions are comprised of politicians that don’t respect them—perhaps even hate them, America’s cops finally have reason to be optimistic.
Don’t let these hyper-partisan organizations fool you. This is not about objective police reform; this is about deep, subjective ideological beliefs about what constitutes how law enforcement should be conducted in America. The left doesn’t want the rule of law and equal justice when they benefit from arbitrary law and social justice.
While still on edge because so many local jurisdictions are comprised of politicians that don’t respect them—perhaps even hate them, America’s cops finally have reason to be optimistic. According to the Post article, Attorney General Sessions “has said his aim is to improve police morale and allow officers to fight violent crime without fear of being shamed or second-guessed.” The left in this country has no idea how good it is for America’s cops to hear this sentiment expressed from the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
It sure beats “The… police acted stupidly.”
