Justice Department taking backward steps
Attorney General Jeff Sessions doesn’t know much about how the police in Ferguson, Missouri, treat black citizens. He didn’t bother to read the Justice Department report that found that Ferguson’s municipal government has historically acted as if black residents were trespassers, to be rousted and fined for petty offenses and jailed if they couldn’t pay up. Sessions read only a summary of the report, he told reporters in February.
He didn’t read the Justice Department’s report on the Chicago Police Department, either, which cited frequent use of excessive force, largely aimed at black and brown citizens. The report also noted that police supervisors rarely challenged officers who meted out the abuse. Sessions dismissed the findings as not “scientifically based,” even though, again, he read only the summary.
Yet the attorney general knows enough to believe that law enforcement officials in Ferguson and Chicago and Baltimore are the ones being mistreated. He seems poised to overturn several agreements negotiated by the Obama administration -- agreements that mandated systemic changes in local police departments with a history of abusive conduct. It’s an alarming turn of events. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is now poised to turn the agency’s mission on its head. Instead of protecting those citizens who have endured violence at the hands of overzealous and, yes, racist police officers, the department will protect the police officers, allowing them to continue their brutality unchecked. In other words, the Department of Justice will not be standing up for justice.
If Sessions cared about facts, he would have read the reports in their entirety. He would have noted that the investigations were thorough and evenhanded. (If the Chicago report was largely anecdotal, that’s because Chicago police were notoriously deficient in documenting their interactions with civilians.) In Ferguson, for example, Obama’s Justice Department exonerated officer Darren Wilson, who shot 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Brown’s shooting, though apparently justified, helped to launch a painful national conversation about the relationship between law enforcement and citizens of color. That conversation was long overdue.
Despite the considerable racial progress since the civil rights movement -- progress capped by the election of a black president -- the criminal justice system remains a last bastion of explicit racism, starting with the brutality many rank-and-file officers show toward black and brown citizens. With the growing popularity of cellphones, there is now ample evidence of that brutality.
But there are millions of white citizens who don’t want to be reminded of the racism that continues to thrive, unchecked, in certain sectors of society. They don’t want to grapple with clear evidence of law enforcement agents who gun down unarmed black men offering no resistance. They don’t want to hear that the complaints offered by protest groups such as Black Lives Matter are justified.
Enter Donald J. Trump, who ran a campaign that conjured up a parallel (and nonexistent) universe of cities overrun by violent thugs and police agencies handicapped by a politically correct federal government. In Trump’s telling, violent crime is running rampant because police officers can no longer do their jobs.
As he put it in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention: “Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation . ... The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life . ... The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end.”
As many observers pointed out, Trump’s America was created out of “alternative facts” -- actually a hodgepodge of propaganda, exaggeration and outright lies. While the murder rate is up slightly in a few cities, crime overall is still trending downward, as it has for the last two decades. The violent crime rate peaked in the 1990s and is nowhere near that historic high now.
But creating fear among his constituents serves Trump well. While he is actively working against their economic interests, he keeps them distracted by ginning up their fear of those whose skin is darker and whose ritual of worship is different. It’s a shame that his supporters fall for that.