This has to be the best piece to show the murder of George Floyd was the deliberate result of Trump’s gutting Obama’s Police Reforms.
By Jonathan Chait
Last October, Minneapolis Police Union president Bob Kroll appeared at a Trump rally. Clad in his red “Cops for Trump” T-shirt, Kroll (who has been alleged to be affiliated with white supremacists) gloated that the president had unshackled his officers from the restraints imposed by Trump’s predecessor. “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” he told the crowd. “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start takin— letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”
We will never know if that unshackling emboldened Derek Chauvin to murder George Floyd. But the line between the relief demanded by Kroll on behalf of Minneapolis police, and the naked assassination committed on camera by one of his officers, is quite direct. The world around us, in which the streets of every major American city are filled with protesters, is the result of Trump granting the wishes of the most retrograde police officers. They are getting what they asked for.
Chait breifly ndescribes the police reforms Obama’s DOJ put in place.
Whatever wisps of data he could cite to support his wild rhetoric, Trump was drawing a picture borrowed from the imaginations of resentful police who experienced Obama’s carefully drawn nudges as intolerable oppression.
He reversed them swiftly. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, ended the restriction on transferring military equipment to police, reviewed all consent decrees struck by his predecessor, and then restricted their use going forward. “It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” he insisted.
Trump’s hatred of criminal justice reform is not just bleating from an old racist who still thinks the Central Park Five were guilty. It is party doctrine.
And it was not enough for Trump and his supporters merely to uproot the seedling of criminal justice reform. Trump felt obliged as well to clamp down on peaceful protest.
Chait goes on to describe Trump’s vile attacks on Colin Kaepernick and supporters of Black Lives Matter.
Here is his conclusion:
What Trump and Barr cannot say to the protesters now is that they should try working through the system instead. They snuffed out every avenue of bureaucratic and social change. They sowed the wind and now reap the whirlwind.
Do take a few minutes to read the whole piece, it’s well worth the read.
By Radley Balko
One of Sessions’s first acts upon taking office was a memo ordering a review of all current agreements between the Justice Department and police departments across the country, from joint task forces to information-sharing agreements to consent decrees. The memo laid down a set of priorities that department personnel should emphasize when conducting such reviews. Among them: promoting “officer morale” and “public respect for their work.” The memo also prioritized “local control” and “local accountability,” emphasized that “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies” and cautioned that the “misdeeds of individual bad actors” shouldn’t malign the honor and hard work of law enforcement agencies.
Police Brutality and targeting blacks isn’t a bug in Trump’s policies, it’s a feature.