The Justice Department’s ‘Grotesque’ Misconduct against New Orleans Cops

[Geee]

National Review:

As we’ve previously observed, the Obama jihad to fundamentally transform America’s police, spearheaded by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, proceeds from the premise that police departments are corrupt institutions, beset by a culture of racism and law-breaking. This week, after a federal appeals court’s exposé of a breathtaking prosecutorial conspiracy to deprive indicted cops of their civil rights, and then cover it up, it is again time to ask: Which is the corrupt institution beset by a culture of racism and law-breaking — the nation’s police, or the Justice Department, which presumes to tame them?

 

To remember how we got here: Under the stewardship of Eric Holder, and now Loretta Lynch, Justice pounces on every tragedy that Al Sharpton’s shock troops mau-mau into a racial crisis. Inevitably, the racism angle melts away under the spotlight of investigation, but that does not stop DOJ. Exploiting the intimidating power of its bottomless budget — out of which the Republican-controlled Congress has not sliced a thin dime — Justice extorts municipalities with the threat of prosecutions and costly civil suits until they say “Uncle,” agreeing to adopt Obama-compliant policing. (Recall that in 1997, when former terrorist Bill Ayers penned a polemic that likened the American justice system to South Africa under apartheid, then–state senator Obama blurbed it as “a searing and timely account.”)

Predictably, the result is police paralysis, a condition Heather Mac Donald diagnoses as the “Ferguson effect.” It has led to rising crime across the nation, particularly in municipalities that have signed consent decrees (i.e., that have surrendered on the Civil Rights Division’s terms). The principal victims are minority communities that bear the brunt of law enforcement’s retreat.

[Draggingtree]

Let the Police Police

by Heather Mac Donald May 15, 2017, Issue

So says Jeff Sessions, but some big-city chiefs disagree Federal consent decrees — agreements between the federal government and a local agency to change how that agency operates — are burdensome, costly, and rarely justified. You would think, then, that when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in a memo at the end of March that he was reviewing police consent decrees, politicians and police chiefs in the affected cities would have let out a glad cheer. Instead, Sessions’s announcement produced a bizarre spectacle: Local officials proudly proclaimed themselves unable to function in the absence of federal control. Therein lies a tale about law enforcement in the Black Lives Matter era.

 

 Sessions’s March 31 memo signaled an overdue federal course correction regarding policing, coming after the hostile Obama years. The Obama administration had slapped an unprecedented number of consent decrees on police departments, guided by the belief that policing was shot through with systemic racism. The methodology used by the previous Justice Department to determine whether a police agency was engaged in a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional policing was deeply flawed.    https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017-05-15-0100/jeff-sessions-justice-department-police