BLM-Loving Biden Will Be a Disaster for Law Enforcement
There are myriad reasons why any American citizen who is in possession of a sound mind and some knowledge of history should feel trepidation about a “Harris administration with Joe Biden as president.”
Biden has spent a lot of time in the past week making it very clear that he’s going to be making up a set of draconian rules on the fly and using the Chinese Bat Flu as his excuse for doing so. That alone might be enough to keep a freedom-loving American awake at night.
An even more disturbing problem on the Biden horizon, however, is the effect his presidency will have on already-beleaguered law enforcement officers in the United States. The Democrats in D.C. have been supportive of anti-cop violence all year long, carrying on the Obama tradition of blaming police first and siding with criminals who often have rap sheets that read like an unedited version of War and Peace.
In a recent post for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Heather Mac Donald gave a glimpse into what law enforcement will be up against in a Biden administration:
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were unambiguous throughout their presidential campaign: they believe that racism pervades policing and all other aspects of the criminal-justice system. Just a day before the networks declared Biden the president-elect, he claimed a “mandate” to eliminate “systemic racism.” He doubled down on that claim the next day, in his first speech as presumptive president-elect. During the campaign, Biden routinely announced that black parents were right to worry that their children would be shot by the police, an assertion formalized in his campaign plan for “strengthening . . . justice.”
Biden’s plan for “strengthening America’s commitment to justice” reads like a Black Lives Matter wish list; there is no reason to think that a Biden–Harris Justice Department will not implement it. Among its most consequential proposals, it calls for a return to the practice of imposing weakly-justified consent decrees on police departments. During the Obama years, career attorneys in the Justice Department regularly opened civil rights investigations into police departments (called “pattern or practice” investigations) without credible evidence that an agency was systematically violating citizens’ constitutional rights. Those investigations almost invariably resulted in settlements (called consent decrees) that placed police departments under the control of a nonelected federal monitor and a federal judge; monitors collected millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fees while they held police departments to draconian deadlines and mindless paper-pushing mandates for years on end.
Biden is the worst kind of liberal: a privileged white guy who wants to pretend that he is down with the black struggle in America. That’s why he’s all-in on Black Lives Matter, which is a violent, anti-cop terrorist movement, and nothing more.
Barack Obama was the most virulently anti-cop president in United States history. Biden may very well decide that he would prefer that title. The Drooling Husk and his puppeteers have bought-in 100 percent to the “systemic racism” lunacy and that’s going to be an integral part of how a Biden administration tries to reimagine law enforcement.
More from Mac Donald:
But more important than rebutting any specific policy is to challenge the philosophy driving the entire Biden justice agenda. Nearly every plank of that plan is driven by the idea that racial disparities in the criminal system result from bias, not from differences in criminal behavior. Biden is now the standard bearer for the progressive narrative that all racial and ethnic groups have comparable rates of offending. According to that narrative, it is only police, prosecutors, judges, and juries who behave differently based on race—the race of offenders.
That narrative is a myth, and police chiefs have at their fingertips the data necessary to dispel it. They have the data on who is committing the drive-by shootings, robberies, and burglaries in their jurisdictions. Those data indicate that African-Americans are disproportionately represented as offenders—and as victims. We know about such disparities thanks to victim and witness identifications; those victims and witnesses are overwhelmingly minority themselves.
If you talk to any woke progressive — especially in 2020 — statistics are racist. They will never let facts get in the way of the narrative directives of the Hive Mind Central Committee, which will be in complete control of the Biden administration.
The upper echelon Democrats were very late with any sort of condemnation of the BLM or antifa violence that has been plaguing Democrat-run cities since May. Once they did manage a press release or two, their hearts weren’t really in it. Biden still refuses to single out either group because it doesn’t fit the aforementioned “cops are the real problem here” narrative. The none-too-subtle message from Democrats to law enforcement officers is this: We will never have your backs again.
The strain on law enforcement began to show immediately after cities run by progressive idiots voted to defund their police departments. In early summer, the NYPD saw such a massive surge in retirement requests that it had to place a cap on the number submitted per day.
Another City Journal article — this one by Charles Fain Lehman — offers some sobering numbers:
The attrition is not limited to small towns. A survey of news stories indicates that across America’s 50 largest cities, at least 23 have seen chiefs or line officers resign, retire, or take disability this year. Nearly 3,700 beat cops have left, a large proportion from the NYPD (down 7 percent of its officers) but with big drops in Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and elsewhere, too. The Major Cities Chiefs Association told the Wall Street Journal that 18 of its 69 member executives had retired, resigned, or been fired over the past year.
Cities are struggling to replace these departing officers. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, the department has fallen 25 percent short of its recruitment goal amid what chief Vince Niski called “social unrest.” And potential executives are refusing the job, Houston P.D. chief and president of the MCCA Art Acevedo told the Wall Street Journal: “There’s a lot of folks that are hesitant when they see chiefs are getting beat up and getting thrown under the bus by their bosses.”
A Black Lives Matter champion in the White House is going to greatly exacerbate these problems. Especially one who has shown that he is incapable of saying “No” in public to the more radical voices in his party.
Law enforcement has always been an incredibly dangerous occupation, obviously. It became even more so during the eight years that Barack Obama was president. He denigrated cops whenever he could and helped turn more than one criminal into a saintly martyr. Cops have had even bigger targets on their backs since then.
The Biden-Harris administration is going to visit upon law enforcement officers an unholy combination of woke-inspired regulation, depleted resources, and state-sponsored violent rhetoric. It’s going to be even more of a war zone out there for them.
I can’t speak for LEOs, of course, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they probably aren’t feeling Biden’s unity vibe.
It’s Open Season on Police and MSM Is Still Whining About Trump Walking to a Church
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PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear twice a week.
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