When Handed A Gift-Take It

Recently, the law enforcement profession won a victory over an attempt to yet again reform this profession. Before this latest attempt to fix that which is not broken, we had to endure what former President Barack Obama labeled the Twenty-First Century Police Reform Project. It was an overreaction, a knee-jerk response that was nothing more than a politicization of a single incident. To use a baseball analogy, it was a swing and a miss. That call for reform you may recall came after the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department incident in which thug Mike Brown committed a strong-armed robbery (a felony) of a convenience store clerk before attacking and attempting to disarm Officer Darren Wilson. Wilson used deadly force to save his own life. It was ruled justifiable. Soon after began the War on Police. This was the catalyst used by cop haters nationwide that ignited a wave of anti-police rhetoric that continues to this day.

I opposed that attempt to reform policing then and continue to do so to this day. I said at the time that that they were working on the wrong thing. I said that the problem was not policing, the problem was with the ghetto. All the urban pathologies that afflict ail large urban centers are self- inflicted. These ailments are exacerbated by failed urban progressive policies that lead to ineffective parenting, fatherless homes, school failure, not consistently staying in the workforce and poor lifestyle choices by young people like teen pregnancy, joining gangs and drug abuse. Instead of rooting out the dysfunctional behavior and cultural rot, it is much easier for two-bit politicians to go for the low-hanging fruit. They blame the police. This spawned the calls for reform, the calls to defund and my favorite, the calls to re-imagine policing (whatever that is).

Without a lot of forethought, this task force assembled by Obama produced a document that was supposed to fix policing, yet here we are again trying to fix what is not broken. These people never learn. These are all rare incidents. Police use of force incidents have decreased over the years. You don’t overhaul a profession based on anomalies. No reasonable person would. No other profession would tolerate it.

So here we are after another police use of force in Minneapolis, we find politicians looking to score a few cheap political points by bashing the police. Many cities began taking away tools that police need to quell riots and disturbances, tools that were needed to quickly disperse crowds in order to keep the peace and restore law and order and that police need to protect themselves from injury and death. And then there is the granddaddy of them all as they say. Congress, under a so-called bipartisan bill ironically called the George Floyd Police Reform Bill. Now we have the federal government sticking its nose into what is a local issue, a state’s rights issue under the U.S. Constitution. The belief theoretically has always been that states have a vested interest in public safety and controlling crime. Every state has its own unique issues as to public safety. There are cultural differences as well. Rural policing is different from urban policing. What people will allow under these circumstances is different, too.

First of all, no bill at any level should have this convicted felon’s name attached to it. This is the same creep who did prison time for an armed burglary in which he held a loaded firearm to the stomach of a pregnant woman, threatening to kill her. He is the one who was geeked up on fatal levels of fentanyl when he died. He had just attempted to pass a counterfeit $20 bill to buy more drugs, causing the police to be called in the first place. Memorializing this goof stains the legacy of other black Americans that we can be proud of, people like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. No Republican lawmaker who claims to support the police should have wanted their name attached to support of this anti-police bill. Chief among the items listed in this bill was a provision that would strip police of qualified immunity that prohibits suing police in civil court personally for acts that they could not have known at the time they used force were a denial of civil rights. Fortunately, this killed any chance of the bill becoming law. It was a win for law enforcement. Some in law enforcement, however, shamefully disagreed.

After the bill was killed, several law enforcement entities attacked GOP Sen. Tim Scott on how negotiations broke down. It is worth noting that two leading Democrats were pushing eliminating qualified immunity. They were Sen. Cory Booker and U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, both of whom are straight-up cop haters.

What is noteworthy here is that two law enforcement entities were pushing for passage of the bill, the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. They issued a joint statement that read, “Our organizations remain steadfast in working with all interested parties who are willing to take a fact-based approach to enact effective and lasting change, to avoid a patchwork of state laws that do not provide uniform standards and guidance to the policing profession.” The statement went on to say that it would have, “strengthened the law enforcement profession and help improve the state of community police engagement without compromising management and officers’ rights, authority and legal protections.” Cops know bullshit when they hear it. This statement is complete bullshit. This is antithetical to state’s rights and promotes a one-size-fits all approach leading to that slippery slope of federalizing local policing. Additionally, nothing is ever “fact-based” in this anti-police environment.

If you want to know why these two organizations support passage of the George Floyd Act, all you have to do is follow the money. The FOP and the IACP are whoring for dollars. They are looking for federal grant money to supplement their shrinking budgets. They are willing to prostitute themselves and their agencies for money from Washington.

The problem with that approach is that any money given out by the federal governments comes with strings attached. There is no free money here like some misguided law enforcement executives believe. The federal government would love nothing more than to control local police department policies, and this is how they will do it. If you take the money, you must do whatever the feds say. This is a slippery slope and not worth the federal money. Things like data collection requirements will tie up officers with unnecessary report filings. This is time away from preventive patrols and results in higher response times, not to mention that this provides the ammunition to spin and misinterpret the data and hammer the police about the racial component of things like traffic stops and arrests. This will provide an opening for a

Federal Department of Justice pattern and practice investigation and a forced consent decree allowing the feds to take over the agency.

Do the FOP and IACP not understand what is going on here? Instead of a letter disputing GOP Sen. Tim Scott(R) about the failure of this bill to pass, they should have commended him for standing strong against eliminating qualified immunity protection for front line police officers. Not allowing this bill to see the light of day is a win for every law enforcement officer who takes to the streets risking their lives in service to their community. This reminds me of an old saying. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Take the victory and run.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of Americas Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com