Sessions: Monitoring troubled police agencies isn’t helping
In speech, attorney general echoes president’s dark vision of crime
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions indicated Tuesday that the federal government would back away from monitoring troubled police departments, which was the central strategy of the Obama administration to force accountability onto local law enforcement against rising racial tensions.
In his first speech as attorney general, Sessions did not name any specific cities, but he blamed Justice Department scrutiny from afar for undermining the effectiveness of the police across the country. It was a clear reference to the aggressive efforts of the Obama administration to oversee law enforcement agencies charged with civil rights abuses.
“We need, so far as we can, in my view, help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness,” Sessions said in remarks to the National Association of Attorneys General. “And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that. So we’re going to try to pull back on this, and I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.”
The Trump administration, Sessions said, is working “out of a concern to make the lives of people in particularly the poor communities, minority communities, live a safer, happier life so that they’re able to have their children outside and go to school in safety and they can go to the grocery store in safety and not be accosted by drug dealers and get caught in crossfires or have their children seduced into some gang.”
Echoing President Donald Trump’s dark vision of crime in the United States, Sessions said that rising violence in some big cities was “driving a sense that we’re in danger” — even as crime rates nationwide remain near historic lows. Monitoring police departments, Sessions added, did not help.
“One of the big things out there that’s, I think, causing trouble and where you see the greatest increase in violence and murders in cities is somehow, some way, we undermine the respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult,” he said.
A rise in violence in some large cities, including Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis, drove a 10.8 percent increase in murders nationwide in the most recent data from the FBI in September. Even so, crime remains far below the 1970s and 1980s, when drugs and gang violence drove crime rates to new heights, and some Democrats accuse Trump and Sessions of exaggerating the threat.
At the close of the Obama administration, the Justice Department released a scathing report on systemic civil rights abuses at the Chicago Police Department and set the stage for negotiations with the city for a federal monitoring agreement.
But prospects for a deal now look doubtful, with Sessions saying this week that he was unimpressed by the report and openly questioning the value of such agreements.
Sessions spoke as his influence within the Trump administration has become increasingly apparent. In the past week, he has shunted aside two key Obama administration civil rights decisions — protecting transgender students and Texas minority voters — and vowed to recommit federal resources to fighting crime, drugs and illegal immigration, a theme he repeated Tuesday in his address to the law enforcement officials.
After a bruising confirmation battle, Sessions appears poised to topple a range of other practices that he often challenged as a conservative senator from Alabama, including the Obama administration’s phasing out of new prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
Sessions was the first senator to support Trump’s campaign last year, and was picked to formally nominate him at the Republican National Convention in July. He has now leveraged his early loyalty to vault to a strong position in the Cabinet: At an Oval Office meeting last week, the president sided with Sessions when Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, initially opposed rolling back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, officials said.
Trump and Sessions bonded in the campaign over their shared desire to secure the borders, crack down on illegal immigration and reduce crime that both men depicted as out of control.
Sessions’ aggressive early steps at the Justice Department — promising that the federal government will do more on drugs and crime and leave civil rights issues to the states — has buoyed a number of conservatives.
“I think he’s right,” Doug Peterson, the Republican attorney general in Nebraska, said after listening to Sessions pledge what amounted to a new war on drugs at a speech Tuesday in a Washington ballroom. He also said that he agreed with Sessions’ decisions to defer to the states on things like the use of bathrooms for transgender students.
“I appreciate the attitude he’s taken,” said Peterson, whose state was among a dozen that challenged the transgender decision by the Obama administration. “It’s really a separation of powers issue.”
While civil rights advocates and liberal groups say that a number of the stances Sessions has taken were not unexpected, they remain troubled. The focus on states’ rights — which some see as a code phrase for segregation in the civil rights era — is particularly worrisome, they say.
“Trump went out of his way to select an attorney general who had a history of hostility” to immigrants’ rights, minority protections and other issues, said David Cole, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union who testified in the Senate against Sessions’ nomination. “Thus far, all signs are that Sessions is playing to type.”