Would you charge police departments with discrimination if, because men are only half the population, their arrestees are more than 50 percent male? This “disparate impact” standard is precisely what a Joe Biden administration would apply — predictably, though, only in the area of race.
While the “Biden” scheme is likely the handiwork of the cognitively declining president-suspect’s handlers, it’s hardly original. As WND.com reports:
Barack Obama established many precedents while he was in the White House for eight years, including that he had his Department of Justice place more police departments under federal control than any previous administration, ever.
Now Joe Biden has confirmed he plans to return to those schemes.
It was an analysis in City Journal that noted, at a time when the administration of President Trump was trying to relieve local departments of some of the more onerous requirements, that Obama was prolific with those “binding agreements” that ended up costing local police departments “millions of dollars to implement and take dozens of officers off the street to fill out reams of paperwork within rigid deadlines.”
… Now, according to Fox News, Biden plans to use the DOJ to “crack down on police departments allegedly engaged in ‘systemic misconduct.’”
On a website, Biden’s campaign confirms he will “expand” the DOJ’s operations that impact local departments and agencies.
“The Washington Post, which reported this week on how Biden intends to return to the Obama method of ‘policing the police,’ reports that 25 ‘pattern or practice’ investigations were opened in the Obama-era compared to just one under Trump,” Fox also informs.
“The Post also reports that Biden is expected to revive the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, which used a ‘collaborative reform’ program under Obama but was ended under Trump,” Fox later related.
The term “collaborative reform” should raise alarms. It’s in the nature of the euphemisms the Left so loves, another example being “comprehensive immigration reform” (a.k.a. amnesty).
Establishment leftists are smart enough to know that just as “defunding the police” cries alienated voters — Biden himself said it hurt the Democrat brand — outright calls to nationalize law enforcement wouldn’t play well in Peoria. It’s better to proceed incrementally, to boil the frog slowly, as is the Left’s wont.
Biden alluded to this, too. He said in a leaked audio, “I also don’t think we should get too far ahead ourselves on dealing with police reform,” Fox tells us. “Too far ahead of oneself” means, of course, “to do or say something sooner than it ought to be done.”
And what the Bidenites have more clearly signaled they’re going to do is alarming enough. Consider that during the Obama administration, the consent-decree process “routinely was used against police departments based on statistics regarding the race of those arrested,” WND also reports. “The flaw was that the assessment was compared to the population, not to the crime rates of the different components of the population.”
As an example, imagine this were applied to New York City, where a statistic held that 96 percent of all crime is committed by blacks and Hispanics. This should mean that approximately 96 percent of arrests would be of blacks and Hispanics under fair policing standards. Yet since those groups comprise only 52.6 percent of the city’s population (2010 census), this would by definition be labeled “discriminatory” and legally actionable under the Biden/Obama metric.
This is nothing new, mind you. It’s essentially the “disparate impact theory” standard. Applied in the past to testing (e.g., police exams), it states that if groups perform differently on a given test or fail to measure up equally to a given standard, that yardstick by definition constitutes illegal discrimination.
This social-engineering scheme was used, for example, to scrap police-and-fire-department physical-fitness tests that women had difficulty passing; in one instance, the Eric Holder DOJ sued the Pennsylvania state police in 2014 for treating females equally.
Applying this theory to law- or rule-enforcement/punishment isn’t new, either. Just consider how the Obama administration and certain localities put pressure on schools to stop disciplining many misbehaving black and Hispanic students; the idea was to remedy the “oppression” they suffered by being suspended and expelled at higher rates than other pupils.
Yet as Professor Thomas Sowell asked in 2014, do you really believe “that black boys cannot possibly be misbehaving more often than Asian American girls”?
Also note that no one seems troubled by white students being suspended and expelled more than their Asian-descent peers.
Likewise, and as I stated in the opening sentence, police departments are never condemned as sexist because they arrest more men than women. But arresting more blacks and Hispanics for the same reason — the groups’ greater criminality — is deemed a trespass. This applying of a disparate-impact get-out-of-jail-free card to some groups but not others, based on identity-politics prejudices, is where the true unjust discrimination lies.
Tragic here is that this agenda was born of and grew on a lie: that blacks are unfairly targeted by cops. And this lie is being used as a pretext to exert federal control over local police. Yet the thinking here is odd.
That is, some assailed police forces are in black-run cities such as Baltimore (the Freddie Gray case). Yet if this is going to be defined racially, let’s say, for argument’s sake, that black residents are unhappy with the police in a city with a black mayor, black police chief, and largely black politicians elected by a majority black population. Why, then, would they want to outsource the city’s policing to a largely non-black federal government whose officials are elected by an 87-percent non-black national population?
Putting race aside, why would you want to trade police controlled close to home — by a sheriff or mayor the locals can see personally and vote from office — for cops controlled by faceless bureaucrats 1,000 miles away?
Why the Left would is obvious: The police are one of the country’s last mostly “conservative” institutions. And while controlling mainstream media, academia, entertainment, Big Tech, and most of corporate America is grand, you can’t completely impose your will on the people without boots on the ground — ergo, the need to control law enforcement.
If anyone thinks the cops aren’t responsive to his needs now, just wait until they’re beholden to Washington for their income and jobs.
