Joe Biden Plans to Pursue Obama-Era Plan to Take Control of Police Departments

Written with contribution from Sheriff David Clarke

During the time that Barack Obama was in office, he set many precedents that easily earned him the badge of one of the most radical statists commanders-in-chief our nation has had.

If not the most radical.

He was a disgrace to the office of the presidency, and worked towards an expansion of the federal government’s powers that would make FDR blush.

This includes, as WND notes, having had his Department of Justice place more police departments under the control of the federal government than any previous administration.

Ever.

Now, his Vice President, President-elect Joe Biden, has made clear he intends to do the same.

In an analysis recently published in City Journal, as the Trump administration has been trying to relieve local departments of the more cumbersome requirements applied by his predecessor, Obama had actively pursued “binding agreements” which ultimately drained departments of “millions of dollars to implement and take dozens of officers off the street to fill out reams of paperwork within rigid deadlines.”

The Obama DOJ had doggedly pursued “collaborative reform” from police departments by threat of the “the onerous consent-decree process” unleashed upon the noncompliant.

Now, Fox News has reported that Biden plans to “expand” DOJ operations that have influence over local law enforcement departments and agencies and to “crack down on police departments allegedly engaged in ‘systemic misconduct.'”

This is why Biden felt comfortable trying to put some distance between himself and the “defund the police” movement. This Obama administration alum’s people already know how to wield the full power of the bureaucracy on the departments they’re trying to destroy.

As WND explains, “During the Obama administration, the process routinely was used against police departments based on statistics regarding the race of those arrested. The flaw was that the assessment was compared to the population, not to the crime rates of the different components of the population.”

That’s right. It left out a key benchmark that black suspects are disproportionately involved in violent crime compared to their white male counterparts. That explains away the disparity in arrests of black males.it’s called cooking the books.

“Biden’s plan note that the Obama administration used both ‘pattern and practice’ investigations and consent decrees to address claims of misconduct in places like Ferguson, Missouri – which was engulfed in riots and violence after the death at the hands of a police officer, ruled a justified shooting, of Michael Brown in 2014,” they add.

As Fox noted, “Under former President Barack Obama and his two attorney generals, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, nearly two dozen investigations were launched against various law enforcement agencies.”

Enter the Trump administration to severely limit the application of such plans, which were called by Trump’s original Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, “one of the most dangerous, and rarely discussed, exercises of raw power is the issuance of expansive court decrees.”

Now, Biden has vowed to use the DOJ to “root out unconstitutional or unlawful policing,” ensuring that these “pattern-and-practice investigations” will be resuming if he is indeed sworn in on January 20th.

The City Journal analysis noted that the Obama DOJ concerns had often boiled down to mere “nitpicking,” as is certainly easy to imagine considering the way progressives characterize racism and discrimination these days.

It pointed to Milwaukee officers who had been targeted by the Obama DOJ for stopping black individuals for traffic stops at a rate allegedly three times higher than they stopped whites.

However, the report noted, “investigators concede that the department deploys its resources based on ‘data to identify neighborhoods of higher crime rates.’ Race, in other words, has nothing to do with deployment or enforcement. But, the report goes on to explain, ‘community members have expressed concern that the areas identified as high crime are also more populated by minority community members. As a result, MPD’s data-driven policing strategy has a disparate impact on minority community members.'”

The only disparity is that blacks are over-represented in crime victimization.