Speaking this week to the National Association of Attorneys General, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions (shown) said the Department of Justice will end the Obama-era harassment of local police departments.
“We need to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness, and I’m afraid we’ve done some of that. So we’re going to try to pull back on this,” Sessions stated in giving the reason for this abrupt change of policy. “I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights. It’s out of concern to make … people, particularly in poor communities, minority communities, live a safer, happier life.”
Sessions told his counterparts at the state level that the rising rate of murders seen in large cities such as Chicago is partly because of the lack of respect for local police by the federal government, particularly from the Justice Department he now leads. “One of the big things out there now that’s causing trouble,” he noted, “and where you see the greatest increase in violence and murders is somehow, someway, we undermine our respect for police and make their job more difficult. We’re not seeing the kind of effective, community-based, street-based policing that we have found to be so effective.”
The former U.S. senator from Alabama argued that police officers have become increasingly hesitant to enforce the law in many cases, fearing that their actions could be video-recorded and second-guessed by some in the public.
Sessions said that the Trump administration wants to see local communities where law-abiding citizens are “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.”
Therefore, Sessions assured that he would “put bad men behind bars,” promising to prioritize cases so as to go after violent offenders and drug cartels. He also vowed to enforce immigration law.
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Sessions added that the Justice Department would investigate any evidence of systemic violations of civil rights; however, he stated that it will not be continuing the Obama administration’s practice of investigating entire police departments for “civil rights violations” simply because of isolated incidents.
The Obama Justice Department routinely ignored concepts such as probable cause when deciding to launch investigations into local police departments such as in Ferguson, Missouri. Under the rule of Attorney General Eric Holder, Justice Department officials routinely went on “fishing expeditions” just to see if they could find some illegal activity or violation of civil rights within local police departments.
Not surprisingly, these very public investigations created a mistrust of the particular local police department under investigation, as well as local police departments in general. The solution offered in every case, of course, was more federal control over the local police.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who is black, charged in his new book, Cop Under Fire, that “Obama hates cops,” and that his attorney general, Eric Holder, carried out his anti-local police agenda. “Eric Holder and Barack Obama are smart men,” noted Clarke. “They know that their words reverberate through the culture. However, they continued to side with the criminals instead of the police.”
Clarke observed that this continuing narrative produces “grave results” — situations in which police officers are killed, and other officers become increasingly hesitant to intervene in many incidents for fear they could be charged with “police brutality.” He stated, “We might be reaching a tipping point with the mind-set of officers, who are beginning to wonder if the risks they take to keep communities safe are even worth it anymore.” In New York and other places, “we’re seeing a natural recoil from law enforcement officers,” who do not believe their civilian political leaders have their backs. He noted that not only did these anti-local police policies of Obama and Holder result in the killing of police officers, but the officers’ reluctance to enforce laws for fear of being investigated unfairly by the U.S. Justice Department has been “getting blacks killed.”
Former police officer James Fitzgerald, president of Law Enforcement Charitable Foundation, who is on a national speaking tour for the constitutional-conservative John Birch Society (parent organization of The New American magazine), agrees with Clarke’s observations. “Law enforcement officials across the nation are breathing a sigh of relief over the results of the recent presidential election,” he stated. “They have been relentlessly attacked by two attorneys general, the White House, and the left-wing press.”
Fitzgerald offered the recent riots in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Charlotte as examples. “In each of these cities,” he noted, black felons were “shot and killed by police, and in a few days hundreds of demonstrators descended on these communities, most of them members of radical-left groups including the Revolutionary Communist Party.”
According to Fitzgerald, these violent demonstrations are part of a national concerted effort, and not spontaneous uprisings. “Virtually all of these leftist thugs were bused in from various parts of the country,” he asserted, “and were paid substantial sums of money to make sure peaceful gatherings were moved to destructive riots.”
Local law enforcement was told not to interfere with the looting, burning, and destruction by the violent demonstrators, Fitzgerald added. “The game plan by the Left is to show that local police are unable to contain peaceful demonstrations that turn violent, and therefore we need a national police force to preserve order.”
Sheriff Clarke echoed Fitzgerald’s assertions in his book, arguing that one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Alicia Garza, is an ardent admirer of the female Marxist revolutionary Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther cop-killer who has taken refuge in Communist Cuba. As Sheriff Clarke explained in his book, Shakur was on the run for several felonies in New York, including bank robbery, when pulled over in 1973 by two New Jersey state troopers. Shakur and a companion fired several shots at the officers, killing one and severely wounding the other. She later managed to escape to Communist Cuba, where Clarke said “she was granted political asylum, and the government there even gave her money for living expenses.” Shakur referred to herself as a “20th century escaped slave.”
And Garza, the co-founder of BLM, is an admirer of this police murderer, who lives on the dole under a Communist dictatorship.
Fortunately, there is a new attorney general at the Justice Department, and Jeff Sessions will assuredly not continue the Obama-Holder Era war on local police.
In his talks, Fitzgerald recommends contacting members of Congress and asking them to conduct investigations into the role played by leftist billionaire George Soros and others like him “in the funding and organizing of violent demonstrations across the nation in recent years.”
For those who can take an even more active role in combatting the war on local police, Fitzgerald suggests joining a local group of Support Your Local Police, an ad-hoc committee of The John Birch Society dedicated to keeping local police departments independent of federal control.
Photo: AP Images
