Call it, maybe, an example of Making Policing Great Again. A troubling step toward the federalization of local law enforcement taken by the Biden administration has just been reversed by the Trump administration. The issue concerns “consent degrees,” court-enforced agreements that allow the Washington leviathan to monitor and control local police. Such control is contrary to the Constitution, of course. It’s quite necessary, though, if the feds are to have complete societal control.
Create Crises — and Never Let Them Go to Waste
Used as a pretext for these decrees are cases of alleged police misconduct. Examples are the 2020 deaths of criminal George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. As for Trump’s remedial action, the Department of Justice related in a Wednesday press release:
Today, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is beginning the process of dismissing lawsuits against the Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota police departments.
These lawsuits, which were filed at the last minute by the Biden administration after President Donald Trump’s reelection, accused Louisville and Minneapolis of widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing practices by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relying on flawed methodologies and incomplete data. They also sought to subject the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments to sweeping consent decrees that went far beyond the Biden administration’s accusations of unconstitutional conduct; the decrees would have governed many aspects of those police departments, including their management, supervision, training, performance evaluations, discipline, staffing, recruitment, and hiring. In short, these sweeping consent decrees would have imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.
“Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda,” added Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
A relevant DOJ tweet follows.
Seizing Total Control With Half the Story
As for the “statistical disparities” mentioned, at issue is a common ploy. For example, MinnPost wrote in 2023, relating a Biden administration argument for consent-decree action:
The Department of Justice estimates the Minneapolis Police Department stopped Black people 6.5 times and Native Americans 7.9 times more than white people from 2016 to 2022. The estimates were made based on data of actual stops as compared to the groups’ share of the population.
It has also been claimed that black suspects are 6.5 times more likely than white ones to be subjected to use of force. Taken alone, however, is this meaningful?
Well, consider a 2020 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. It informs that men are three times as likely as women to be stopped by police. Males are also three times more likely to be subjected to use of force.
Does this mean police have a misandrist bias?
While possible, this conclusion can’t be drawn from the above data. We also must at least know the sexes’ criminality rates. It turns out, too, that men are approximately three times as likely as women to commit actionable crimes. They’re also overrepresented about sixfold among violent offenders.
So it is with racial disparities as well. For example, blacks are 13 percent of the U.S. population, but commit approximately 50 percent of our country’s homicides. And the phenomenon can be even more profound in large municipalities, as a statistic years ago relating to New York City informed. It held that 96 percent of all crime and 98 percent of gun crime are committed by blacks and Hispanics. (Note: The two groups together constitute only 48.5 percent of the city’s population.)
In other words, anything can be portrayed as unjust by presenting data selectively. But painting the entire picture here doesn’t yield an image of anti-black bias.
Calculated Obtuseness
Of course, none of the above is rocket science that only the deepest minds can apprehend. Those painting only half the picture aren’t innocent, lost Truth-seekers who, despite their best efforts, find a correct diagnosis elusive. Rather, leftists present the wrong diagnosis because they’re pushing the wrong prescription — one that, interestingly, always appears the perfect prescription for increasing their own power and control.
Thus is it good that the DOJ will also be ceasing legal action against the following police departments:
- Phoenix, Arizona
- Trenton, New Jersey
- Memphis, Tennessee
- Mount Vernon, New York
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
- Louisiana State Police
It makes sense, too. Consider: Gallup informed last year that next to the military, police lead all public institutions in public approval, at 51 percent. (In contrast, Congress’ approval rating fluctuates between eight and 20 percent.)
Most ironically, a 2022 Pew Research Center study found that only 20 percent of Americans trust the federal government overall. So, in other words, what does the consent-decree mentality essentially state?
That an institution a majority of Americans trust should be controlled by an institution a vast majority of Americans distrust. Make it make sense.
Reality, Not Fantasy
A few more points to ponder:
- Through a 2016 study, black Harvard Professor Roland Fryer discovered no anti-black bias in police shootings. In fact, the research might have found that cops are more likely to kill whites. A previous study drew the same conclusion.
- Research has also shown that black and Hispanic cops are more likely than white police to shoot black suspects.
- Police shootings of black suspects have dropped 75 percent over the last several decades.
- Putting pressure and an onus on cops — and accosting them via lawfare — begets “de-policing.” This allows crime to proliferate, which leads to more deaths of black Americans because most crime is in non-white neighborhoods.
Professor Thomas Sowell relates some of the above and much more in the following informative video.
So a question remains: Why do leftists, when they can, put a knee on the police’s neck? It’s not mainly because of law-enforcement abuse of power — it’s because they want law enforcement’s power.
After all, how can you control the people via central government when the people control the police via local government?
