by WIlliam Hahn
No matter your political leanings, law enforcement officers are certainly affected by the outcomes of elections. The closer the election is to home, the more you may be affected. However, U.S. Presidential elections also have ramifications for you through a number of factors, including candidate’s positions on “police brutality,” “criminal justice reform,” and “police reform,” media coverage of police-related matters that prompt candidates to comment, and of course, post-election policies that either support or hinder your job to protect and serve.
The Law Enforcement Charitable Foundation does not endorse political candidates or parties and does not exist to tell you how to vote or who to vote for. We would also put forth that government overreach isn’t the monopoly of just one political party. Rather, both the major parties have a well-worn track record of overreach through Congress, the Presidency, state legislatures, and even local politics. With nearly three years of the President Trump administration realized, we know the level of support to law enforcement. So let’s examine what the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates think of factors that may make your job easier or tougher.
Considered a front runner, former Vice President Joe Biden has revealed his plan for “criminal justice reform.”
According to an online article from Politico:
Biden’s plan includes a variety of proposals related to education and mental health aimed at addressing the “underlying factors” that lead to crime and incarceration, including creating a $20 billion “competitive grant program” that would allocate funding to counties, cities and states for investments targeting “factors like illiteracy and child abuse that are correlated with incarceration.”
Addressing the elephant in the room, the Constitution does not have provision for the federal government to do what Biden is proposing. Nonetheless, the Constitution is usually ignored in these matters and Congress will many times pass the legislation and the funding anyway. However, this does not mean that law enforcement agencies need to accept the money, which would certainly come with plenty of strings attached that would work to shift your allegiance from your local communities to the federal government.
Politico continues,
Biden’s plan seeks to “confront racial and income-based disparities” in the American criminal justice system and “eliminate overly harsh sentencing for non-violent crimes.” Biden pledges his administration’s Justice Department will “use its authority to root out unconstitutional or unlawful policing” and says his DOJ leadership “will prioritize the role of using pattern-or-practice investigations.”
First of all, disparities are used as a frequent reason for government action. But according to professor of economics at George Mason University Walter Williams,
“Legal professionals, judges, politicians, academics and others often operate under the assumption that we are all equal. Therefore, inequalities and disparities are seen as probative of injustice. Thus, government must intervene, find the cause and engineer a policy or law to eliminate the injustice. Such a vision borders on lunacy. There’s no evidence anywhere or at any time in human history that shows that but for some kind of social injustice, people would be proportionally represented across a range of socio-economic attributes by race and sex.”
As for the “unconstitutional or unlawful policing” that Biden points to, there already are plenty of avenues of accountability from local communities that hold local police enforcement in check with rules, regulations, and policies. We see the rhetoric from Biden as being an excuse for arranging more federal involvement where it is neither warranted, needed, nor constitutional.
Another 2020 Presidential Democratic candidate, Senator Kamala Harris, had, according to Time magazine, “a hard time getting support from law enforcement groups” in 2010 when she was running for Attorney General in California. Time also reported that “As a senator, Harris sponsored the End Racial and Religious Profiling Act and supported a bill that would provide funding for police body cameras.”
In regards to “racial profiling,” contributor to The New American Selwyn Duke wrote in a 2015 article:
There’s no such thing as “racial profiling.” Rather, there are only two types of profiling:
Good profiling and bad profiling.
… Profiling is simply a method by which law enforcement can determine the probability that an individual has committed a crime or has criminal intent. And when making this determination, good profiling considers many different factors, such as dress, behavior, the car being driven, tattoos, sex, age, race, and ethnicity. Whatever the details, however, good profiling is practiced in accordance with sound criminological science.”
In the same Time article, the reporter stated, “While Harris previously believed independent inquiries into police shootings should be left to the local district attorneys and prosecutors, she has said that she is now in support of independent inquiries.”
Both of her stances on profiling and independent inquiries indicate that Senator Harris favors big government heavy-handed intrusion that will affect not only the day-to-day practices of policing, but also the accountability avenues that local communities have well established. Both of which open up a larger role (where none should exist) of federal control over local enforcement.
The Time article had this to say about another Democratic candidate, Mayor Pete Buttgieg:
“As a part of his criminal justice reform plan for his 2020 run, Buttigieg hopes to ‘prevent discriminatory police practices’ and ‘increase police accountability for misconduct.’”
To put some perspective to this, James F. Fitzgerald, President of the Law Enforcement Charitable Foundation, wrote in the August 2019 issue of The John Birch Society Bulletin, that Mayor Buttgieg “was quick to sympathize with the demonstrators” of the Black Lives Matter movement that protested in his city after an armed black resident was killed by a white police officer. At the time, Eric Logan was attacking the police officer with a knife.
According to Fitzgerald, instead of defending the officer, Mayor Buttgieg “has called on the U.S. Justice Department to take over the investigation.”
Again, federal intervention of local police is never a good idea. One of the hallmarks of tyranny is a national police force that enforces the will of the state. Local law enforcement serves the communities they work in and reside, staying independent of central government and providing a highly important layer of separation between local and federal.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Cory Booker, and Senator Elizabeth Warren have all bought into the debunked disparities excuse for further federal control of law enforcement. Back to the Time magazine article, Klobuchar has a record of being tough on lower crime offenses, but she was a co-sponsor to the First Step Act, along with Senator Booker, “which led to the release of thousands of prisoners who were arrested for drug-related offenses.”
Booker has taken an additional step to “reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, improve bias training for law enforcement and remove barriers for people with criminal convictions to receive certain job licenses” in a bill he has introduced earlier this year.
Senator Warren sees a criminal justice system that is “racist … from front to back.” In a recent Democratic debate, she said that the system needs to be made colorblind, which she argues will better protect law enforcement.
There are other Democratic candidates running, but currently, these seem to be those that have risen to the top of the polls. Their comments and stances show you of their penchant to use the federal government as a tool to force equality and justice as they define it, regardless of the impact it has on the law enforcement community.
Allowing the federal government into the affairs of local law enforcement brings many risks that can upset the delicate balance that exists between local community and officers. The New American magazine reported online in 2015 that “The federal government has been busy creating unconstitutional agencies co-opting policing while simultaneously using a ‘carrot and stick’ approach — unconstitutional federal aid and federal mandates — to absorb and coerce the local police, transforming them into instruments of an emerging national police force.”
The article continues,
“This subversive transformation of America’s way of policing has been under way for a long time. The American ideal of local police — locally funded and locally controlled — whose job it is to protect the public against violent and fraudulent criminal elements that will always be found in every society, is being radically changed. Over the past decade, this process has accelerated dramatically, with every terrorist incident, riot, police shooting, or upsurge in criminal activity serving as an excuse to further nationalize. … Virtually every federal agency now has its own SWAT-style paramilitary ‘police’ unit to enforce its edicts and ‘protect the homeland.’ … There are now tens of thousands of federal ‘police’ running around in an assortment of uniforms, even though the U.S. Constitution provides no authority for — and in fact prohibits — any such federal police agencies.”
Unfortunately, as recently as 2018, the DOJ has continued its stealth campaign to nationalize police. The New American reported online, “Under a Department of Justice program known as ‘Equitable Sharing,’ local police are being deputized as federal agents in order to participate in Joint Terrorism Task Forces, enabling them to bypass their state’s own forfeiture and surveillance laws so they can spy on individuals suspected of terrorism or other crimes falling under federal jurisdiction.”
Given the answers from the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates, we are predicting that they will only further this push to use the federal government to nationalize police by defining your role, providing parameters for law enforcement, and using programs, equipment, training, and funding to ensure you are primarily working on their agenda instead of placing your focus on your local community.
So in answering the headline — yes — we see a drop in support of local policing with a renewed effort on more federal intervention. We strongly urge departments to resist the temptation to become entangled with the federal government in order to keep a strong allegiance to local communities, as well as to keep those you serve protected from unconstitutional federal overreach.