Biden’s ‘justice’ means bad news for American police departments

Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online assesses the Biden administration’s likely impact on American police.

As foreseen here during the confirmation hearings for Attorney General Merrick Garland and other Biden nominees for top DOJ slots, the Obama Justice Department is back, and that means the police departments of the United States are in for radical surgery.

Fired Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Derek Chauvin was convicted … on all three homicide counts in the racially charged George Floyd case. With the inevitability of the morning sun, AG Garland announced … that the Justice Department is launching a “pattern or practice” investigation of the MPD. The pretext is that the evidence in Chauvin’s case suggests that the police department as a whole is riven by — all together now! — systemic racism. … This, despite the fact that some of the most compelling testimony in Chauvin’s trial came from MPD officials, who related how the actions of Chauvin and the three other subsequently fired cops (who are scheduled to be tried jointly in the Floyd case this summer) ran afoul of the MPD’s existing use-of-force, medical-assistance, and community-policing guidelines.

You knew this was coming.

The Obama administration made a habit of exacerbating tensions created by police-involved incidents involving black men. Its Justice Department then exploited such controversies to carry out a federalization of local law-enforcement in conformance with Obama-preferred progressive policing. The feds don’t go after the locals on the individual case — there will be no civil-rights criminal prosecution of Chauvin and the other ex-cops. Instead, the DOJ uses vague standards Democrats have written into civil law, amplified by the Justice Department’s gargantuan budget for litigating against states and municipalities, to “reform” entire police departments. …

… The police departments of this country are now more representative of their communities than at any time in American history. No one knows more than they do that black lives matter.