At Salon, Justin Elliott writes Obama cracks down on abuses by big-city police departments:
Thomas Perez
In a marked shift from the Bush administration, President Obama's Justice Department is aggressively investigating several big urban police departments for systematic civil rights abuses such as harassment of racial minorities, false arrests, and excessive use of force.
In interviews, activists and attorneys on the ground in several cities where the DOJ has dispatched civil rights investigators welcomed the shift. To progressives disappointed by Eric Holder's Justice Department on key issues like the failure to investigate Bush-era torture and the prosecution of whistle-blowers, recent actions by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division are a bright spot.
In just the past few months, the Civil Rights Division has announced "pattern and practice" investigations in Newark, New Jersey and Seattle. It's also conducting a preliminary investigation of the Denver Police Department, and all this is on top of a high-profile push to reform the notorious New Orleans Police Department -- as well as criminal prosecutions of several New Orleans officers. ...
Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a rising star in the Democratic Party, dismissed the ACLU's report on civil rights abuses back in September, accusing the group of "casting unnecessary aspersions on the police department through the distortion of facts." But when the DOJ announced its formal investigation earlier this month, Booker stood at a press conference with federal officials and said he welcomed the move. Given that many of the alleged violations -- and the failure of the police department to respond to complaints -- happened on Booker's watch, the episode will likely be seen as a blot on his record.
The man who is at least partly responsible for crackdown on police misconduct is Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. In the 1990s, Perez, the son of Dominican immigrants, was a prosecutor in the division working on police misconduct cases; he later served as special counsel to Ted Kennedy on civil rights issues. The DOJ declined my request to interview Perez. But he has made it publicly clear that things have changed since the Bush years. ...
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
Despite his constant assertions of his military expertise, when speaking this week McCain once again proved ignorant of the most basic facts of the war he so avidly supports. He said that we have "drawn down to pre-surge levels": we most pointedly have not, causing the McCain campaign to angrily talk about "nitpicking" the difference between "verb tenses" -- like, say, past, present, future, and imaginary pluperfect. Because McCain wasn't badly misinformed, they assert, he was just talking about the future as if it were the present, or something.
He also claimed places like Mosul are "quiet" -- wrong. The latest suicide bombing was a mere day beforehand.
So when McCain said, in the same breath as those two fabrications that the Iraq War is "succeeding", it only called more attention to the bizarre and misinformed assertions he was using to justify that claim.
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