Targeting the Police | The Weekly StandardThe Holder Justice Department declares open season on big city police departments
Excerpt-
The deputy attorney general who forced federal control on the LAPD in 2000 was none other than Eric Holder, who now presides over a Justice Department determined to make the Los Angeles consent decree the model for its future oversight of police departments. The current assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas Perez, told a conference of police chiefs in June 2010 that the Justice Department would be pursuing “pattern or practice” takeovers of police departments much more aggressively than the Bush administration, eschewing negotiation in favor of hardball tactics seeking immediate federal control. Perez has hired nine additional attorneys to beef up his division’s search for alleged police agency racism and to sue agencies that don’t capitulate to federal demands.
To see what lies ahead for the nation’s police, one need look no further than the Los Angeles Police Department’s past and present travails with the Justice Department.
The LAPD consent decree was a power grab from day one. The first thing DOJ demanded as part of its new authority over the LAPD was the collection of racial information on every stop the L.A. officers make—even though the corruption scandal which provided the pretext for the consent decree had nothing to do with race or alleged “racial profiling.”...
Today, an L.A. officer can hardly nod at a civilian without filling out numerous forms documenting his salutation for later review. If he returns fire at a gangbanger, his use of force will be more intensely investigated for wrong-doing than the criminal shooting that provoked the officer’s defensive reaction in the first place.
The LAPD spent approximately $40 million trying to comply with the decree in its first year and close to $50 million annually for several years thereafter. It pulled 350 officers off the street to meet the decree’s mountainous paperwork requirements. Nevertheless, it struggled to meet the fanatical standards for compliance imposed by the federal monitor overseeing the decree, who demanded that virtually 100 percent of the arbitrary deadlines for filing reports be met on time, regardless of whether the supervisors who missed their deadline by a few days were otherwise occupied with a triple homicide investigation...
[Read more about the 'post racial' administration in the above link.]
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