Trump administration scraps police reform measures in some US cities.

 

File photo of a Minneapolis police officer. BBC/Getty. 

The Trump administration is scraping police reform measures in several US cities. BBC. Two cities are having oversite agreements nixed, Minneapolis and Louisville, while civil rights investigations six other cities, most notably Phoenix and Memphis, are being dropped. Two lawsuits brought by the Justice Department under Biden targeting Minneapolis and Louisville were dropped as well. The agreements and investigations were launched in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and several prominent cases, including George Floyd in Minneapolis and Beronna Taylor in Louisville. The Trump administration says that the agreements were not needed and would handcuff local police departments from actually fighting crime. They also said that the Biden administrations findings were based on flawed methodologies and incomplete data. 

My Comment:

I think out of all the things the Biden administration screwed up domestically, criminal justice has to be #1. Obviously foreign policy was even worse, but for things that affect the day to day lives of American citizens, criminal justice has to be his biggest failure. 

Crime has exploded since the police reforms that Black Lives Matter and other activist groups demanded were put into place. There are cities now where it's just not safe to live and the murder rate is close to as bad as it was back in the 1990's, but without the drug wars that caused them. 

That was, of course, predictable. Things like ending cash bail and handcuffing police were never about actually solving or stopping crime, they were about making activists happy over perceived, not real, injustices. 

That isn't to say that police are perfect, far from it. But I never bought into the narrative that police were specifically racist. They only look that way to outsiders because they don't actually understand the crime rates. When one community has a crime rate dramatically higher than everyone else, of course there are going to be major problems. And in America that community is largely African American. 

Of course, under Joe Biden's administration the "maybe they commit more crime" argument was called racist and all these steps were taken to try and fix the supposed racism. It obviously backfired as crime went up. Indeed, it probably caused more racism than ever as folks were tired of their being a two tier justice system were time and time again folks were let go after committing horrible crimes, just to commit even more when they get out. 

It makes sense that they would get rid of these programs and investigations under that context. I have seen zero evidence that the Trump administration even gives lip service to the racial justice model of criminal justice and as someone who was educated in the field, it makes me happy to say that. I don't think there is any evidence that racial justice in policing has any positive effect on crime. 

So what does work? I know when I was in College almost two decades ago, the debate wasn't about racial justice, it was between community oriented policing or the old school "broken windows" policing. Community policing was police trying to forge bonds with the community in order to solve crimes. Broken windows was responding heavily to small crimes in the theory that it would prevent the larger crimes. 

Both systems worked a lot better than what we have now! I remember the debates we had back then but under both systems, crime was down compared to now and compared to the 1990's. Why? Because the focus was on policing, not social justice!