Under the guise of “restoring trust” between communities and police departments that have been militarized by the federal government, the Obama administration’s Justice Department announced this March
that it had selected six U.S. cities to serve as pilot sites, to
develop and deploy federal guidance for local police to create better
procedures, reduce racial bias, and regain citizens’ trust.
The plan, which is controversial because it is in line with Obama administration goals to further nationalize and federalize local law enforcement,
has been officially dubbed the “National Initiative for Building
Community Trust and Justice.”
It will use U.S. taxpayer dollars to
deploy “experts” and “researchers” charged with training officers to act
in a manner that the DOJ deems just — in essence doing the bidding of
the Obama administration.
Officially, the Justice Department will be
helping local officials “fight crime” under the scheme, according to
news reports.
Initially, the
program, which will cost American taxpayers almost $5 million, will aim
to “assess” the relationship between local police and the communities
they serve.
Then, the DOJ squads will work to develop plans supposedly
aimed at enhancing “procedural justice,” reducing bias, and supporting
“reconciliation in communities where trust has been eroded,” the Justice
Department said in a statement announcing the plan.
The first six cities to be targeted as pilot sites will be
Birmingham, Alabama; Fort Worth, Texas; Gary, Indiana; Minneapolis,
Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Stockton, California.
Fort
Worth Mayor Betsy Price described the program as “a tool to strengthen
our partnership with the justice system.” However, other police
departments are also in the cross hairs.
According to the official
announcement, an unspecified number of “police departments and
communities that are not pilot sites” will also be targeted for more DOJ
“training” and “technical assistance.”
Skeptics have pointed to past precedent and deemed the plan
dangerous.
Among other deeply troubling elements, in the past the
Justice Department’s “training” schemes for state and local police have
included, as The New American reported
in 2012, teaching officers to associate mainstream political activism,
such as conservative bumper-sticker displays on cars, with “terrorism”
and “extremism.”
Ironically, the next year, the DOJ itself was exposed working with an anti-Christian extremist group,
the Southern Poverty Law Center, that had inspired a confessed
terrorist to attempt a mass-murder attack on a pro-family group.
The
year after that, the Justice Department came under major fire for funding a New York “community group” that was involved in a rap video promoting the murder of police officers.
Indeed, since Obama took office, the administration has been pumping
out a non-stop barrage of propaganda demonizing tens of millions or even
hundreds of millions of Americans as “extremists” and potential
“terrorists,” owing to their mainstream political views.
The
administration has also consistently vilified police who were accused of
abusing their power, even before investigations were concluded.
Indeed, there’s little reason to believe that this latest effort by
Obama’s DOJ has as its actual goal the increased professionalism of
police.
Attorney General Holder has been repeatedly lambasted for his own
anti-police extremism, including publicly making accusatory comments
about police officers before investigations into the facts of
controversial behavior have taken place.
He was also held in criminal
contempt of Congress — the first sitting DOJ boss in history to face
such a serious measure — after trying to unlawfully cover up the
administration’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program for Mexican
cartels.
Guns from that scheme, which official documents show was aimed
at pushing more assaults on gun rights, resulted in the deaths of
multiple U.S. law-enforcement officers. Holder has successfully avoided
prosecution so far, but the contempt citation remains in effect and
carries a potential jail sentence. Numerous other mega-scandals have
plagued Holder’s tenure as well.
Now, the DOJ boss wants even more control over your local police
department. “By helping to develop programs that serve their own diverse
experiences and environments, these selected cities will serve on the
leading edge of our effort to confront pressing issues in communities
around the country,” Holder said.
It was not immediately clear why or under what authority Holder
thinks the Obama administration should control local police, rather than
allowing them to be overseen by local voters and officials, as has
traditionally been the case in the United States and other free nations.
Other DOJ officials, though, offered the official rationale for the
ongoing takeover and erosion of self-government.
“Restoring trust where
it has eroded is one of the defining public safety challenges of our
day,” argued Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason of the Office of
Justice Programs, apparently without a trace of irony (more than two-thirds of Americans say the federal government is “out of control” and a threat to liberty
— hardly an indicator of public trust).
“Trust-building is the
responsibility of the police and the community, and the National
Initiative’s goal is to build the bridge that will define a new era in
public safety.”
The latest announcements surrounding the controversial Obama-police
scheme occurred, supposedly by coincidence, just 13 hours after two
police officers were shot in Ferguson amid ongoing tensions there —
tensions inflamed by DOJ claims of police racism and injustice in
Ferguson.
“Incidents like the one we have witnessed throw into sharp
relief why conversations like the one we convened today, to build trust
between law enforcement and community members, are so important,”
claimed Holder.
Outlines of the DOJ’s plan were first presented in
September of last year after a Ferguson police officer, who has since
been cleared of criminal wrongdoing in multiple investigations, shot and
killed Michael Brown.
In its official announcement, the Justice Department offered few
details about the real scope of their planned activities, but it is
clearly wide-ranging.
“The three-year grant has been awarded to a
consortium of national law enforcement experts from John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, Yale Law School, the Center for Policing Equity at
UCLA and the Urban Institute,” the March 12 press release stated.
The
“Urban Institute” is a far-left federally funded “think tank” that also
receives funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and other establishment
sources.
Meanwhile, the announcement tried to undermine skeptics’ worries
about new anti-conservative dogma by the government: “The initiative is
guided by a board of advisors which includes national leaders from law
enforcement, academia and faith-based groups, as well as community
stakeholders and civil rights advocates.”
Which “civil rights advocates”
were involved was not made clear, though race-profiteers and incendiary
extremists such as Al Sharpton have strong links to the administration
and its efforts to federalize law enforcement.
“In a holistic approach, the initiative simultaneously addresses the
tenets of procedural justice, reducing implicit bias and facilitating
racial reconciliation,” the release continued, again without any
suggestion of irony even as the administration comes under increasing
fire for fomenting and exploiting the racial unrest in need of
reconciliation.
“The initiative complements and is advised by other
Justice Department components such as the Office of Justice Programs,
the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services [COPS], the Office on
Violence Against Women, the Civil Rights Division and the Community
Relations Service.”
Many of those DOJ units, of course, have come under
heavy criticism as even former Justice Department officials lambaste
Holder for packing them with politicized radicals.
Efforts to calm a worried public will likely go to no avail because
the recent selection of six pilot cities for the controversial policing
schemes came less than a week after Obama’s “Task Force on 21st Century
Policing,” created by unconstitutional executive decree, announced its plans to impose “national standards” on state and local law enforcement
across the nation.
Essentially, in exchange for unconstitutional
federal bribes, the Obama administration plans to in effect further
nationalize and federalize local and state police departments — a
process remarkably similar to the unconstitutional schemes used to foist
the Common Core nationalization of K-12 education on over 40 states.
More than a few critics of Obama’s efforts to further nationalize and
federalize law enforcement — a state and local responsibility under
America’s constitutional system — noted that the scheming was in line
with his campaign rhetoric about building what he called a “civilian
national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as
well-funded” as the U.S. military.
Separately, opponents of the plan
noted that Congress revealed in an official 1961 report that communist
operatives in the West and particularly in the United States were
working hard to nationalize American police forces. Of course, national
police forces — from the KGB to the Gestapo — have always been a
hallmark of tyranny.
The controversial Obama administration demands for national standards
for police, meanwhile, came just a few months after United Nations boss
Ban Ki Moon, exploiting the chaos in Ferguson, called for American police to obey “international standards.”
Like Ban, the Obama administration seized on the unrest in Missouri —
much of it bankrolled by billionaire statist George Soros, it later
emerged — to push his radical agenda to strip communities of control
over their own police departments.
Of course, the Obama administration,
and previous presidents, have also been showering local law enforcement
with military weaponry — ironically one of the purported justifications
for the further federalization of policing.
The constitutionalist organization that publishes this magazine, The
John Birch Society, has for decades been running a nationwide campaign
to “Support Your Local Police and Keep Them Independent.”
From lobbying Congress to cut off the funds and educating the public
about the Constitution, to working with state and local officials to
stop the federal bribes with “strings” attached, there are many ways to
fight back against the establishment’s efforts to impose a national
police force accountable to Washington, D.C. politicians and bureaucrats
rather than local communities.
As Obama and Holder work to usurp all
control over law enforcement from local citizens, Americans who hope to
remain free under the U.S. Constitution must ensure that the
administration’s plot is defeated. Not only is it unconstitutional,
history shows it is extraordinarily dangerous. ~ PatriotNetDaily
Reposted May 22, 2015 – KnowTheLies.com
Source Article from http://www.knowthelies.com/node/10373
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