Too often, the only power capable of compelling police departments to engage in widespread, systemic reforms is the federal government. “It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” is an expression of conservative ideology; it is also an abdication of a responsibility only the federal government can meet. It is ignoring a crime by refusing to collect the evidence.
Sessions’s memo reads as an announcement that it is
no longer the business of the federal government if American citizens’ rights are violated by those sworn to protect them and empowered with lethal force to do so. When local governments violate the basic constitutional rights of citizens, Americans are supposed to be able to look to the federal government to protect those rights. Sessions has made clear that when it comes to police abuses, they’re now on their own. This is the principle at the heart of “law and order” rhetoric: The authorities themselves are bound by neither.
Among the most profound accomplishments of the Justice Department’s reports were the simple documentation and official acknowledgment of the lived realities of millions of ordinary Americans. By pulling back now, it begins to redraw the barriers between worlds that were briefly shattered by the protests of the past few years. It does not ensure that there will be no more victims of systemic police abuse, only that other Americans are less likely to hear them.
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Originally Posted by Zippyjuan
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