Law & order, real & imaginary

It’s sports-talk hour at the Justice Department. “Violent crime is surging in American cities,” drawls longtime-caller Jeff from Mobile, though that’s not, y’know, true. In fact, crime is up sharply in a handful of cities, most notably Chicago, and flat or down in many others. After a quarter century of fairly steady decline, the national murder rate remains near a 50-year low.

Yet American carnage can be averted, United States Attorney General Jefferson Sessions wrote this month, sounding a lot like someone telling Mad Dog “you can’t measure heart,” if we “avoid harmful federal intrusion in the daily work of local police.”

In the real world, cops basically police themselves, for better and for worse, despite feeble efforts from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to pretend otherwise. The feds don’t pay for policing. Don’t set or even track local standards. Don’t know how many people cops kill, or how many cops who get fired from one department end up back on the job in another one.

Those feeble efforts to control local policing (it’s a similar story with education, by the way) date back to 25 years this Friday and the first of what became the five-day Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, when 63 people were killed and a billion dollars of property damaged.

Two years later, Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that paid for local departments to hire 100,000 new cops in exchange for states passing harsher sentencing laws, along with nearly $10 billion in new funding for prisons.

That law — popular at a time when the crime rate had been climbing for a quarter century ended up dogging Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail last year after it came to be understood after a equally long decline as part of a “cure” that did as much harm as help — also gave the Justice Department unprecedented new powers to investigate and force changes to local law enforcement agencies for systematic problems.

And it mandated an annual report on “the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” That may be news to you, what with how, 23 years later, the Justice Department has yet to issue one, since they’re still “trying” to define excessive force.

Back to the present. Sessions thinks — and he’s not all wrong here — that Justice’s probes of local departments, and the consent decrees and other reforms those have led to, were politically motivated, ad hoc exercises.

But the idea that those reviews, and the off-chance of the feds taking a peek under the hood, amount to a war on cops, or explain recent crime spikes in a handful of cities, is a grim joke. The reviews tend to come long after the damage of bad policing has been done (see: Ferguson), and to change little.

To put it in terms Trump would appreciate, Sessions might as well blame the lipstick for why the pig wasn’t picked as Miss America.

Here’s how the attorney general said it, in case you think I’m putting words in his mouth. After his flat, false claim of an urban violent crime surge, he pointed to real rises in Chicago and Baltimore to declare that “amid this plague of violence, too much focus has been placed on a small number of police who are bad actors rather than on criminals. And too many people believe the solution is to impose consent decrees that discourage the proactive policing that keeps our cities safe.”

He didn’t even give lip service to the question of what the right level of focus of would be, just insisted a “small number” (whatever that means) of bad apples won’t spoil the whole barrel.

So here was the nation’s top lawman visiting Suffolk County Friday, vowing to stop the MS-13 gang whose members, many of them illegal immigrants from El Salvador, are wreaking bloody havoc. Good.

But for Jeff from Mobile, more law always means more order.

So instead of staying focused on actual violent criminals, he railed about “lawless” sanctuary cities, blamed the courts that have halted Trump’s executive orders for blood on the streets by “restricting crime tactics” and continued his bizarre on-and-off feud with New York City officials who vow to use discretion — something southern law-and-order types are traditionally all about — in dealing with the feds as ICE ramps up its efforts to round up people here without papers.

The idea that America’s capital for immigrants, legal and otherwise, is also its safest big city is more than he can wrap his head around.

There’s a reason Doris from Rego Park, bless her soul, didn’t get to run the Mets. Yet somehow a native New Yorker picked this guy to run American Justice. Stay tuned.