Mediaboss Marketing

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters.

On a Wednesday afternoon livestream, President Obama delivered an optimistic message about the protests gripping the nation in response to police violence: There is a change in mindset thats taking place, he said.

In a town hall, organized through My Brothers Keeper, an initiative he launched as president, Obama acknowledged that while the last few weeks have been difficult, uncertain, and scary, we are also living through an incredible opportunity for people to be awakened to the ongoing reality of structural racismthe result of a long history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and redlining.

He called on every mayor in the United States to review police use-of-force policies.

This is not an either/or, he said of protesting and pushing legislative reform on the local level. This is both/and.

Comparing the discord and unrest of today to that of the 1960s, Obama said were witnessing a far more representative cross section of America out there on the streets protesting than in the past. He credited the organizing and engagement of young people with forging popular support among a broad coalition of Americans regarding the need for transformative change in police use-of-force tactics. And he pointed to the Guide to Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing that came out of a task force he convened as president, stating that mayors and police chiefs across the country have been too slow to implement the reports recommendations.

As Mother Jones has reported, President Obamas tenure featured renewed attention to enforcing consent decrees, which subject local police departments to federal oversight and sometimes lead to reform. Obama enforced 14 of the 20 legally binding consent decrees that have arisen since Congress created the system after the Rodney King uprisings of 1992. Trump and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions have all but eliminated this oversight.

Yet Obama has also drawn flack from Black Lives Matter activists for what they see as his lukewarm embrace of the movement, centrist critique of protest tactics, and unflinching support for law enforcement. After police officer Darren Wilson killed Mike Brown in 2014, Obama and Eric Holders Justice Department released a 100-page report on patterns of racial discrimination among officers in Ferguson, Missouri, but declined to prosecute Wilson. In todays town hall, Obama commended officers who have chosen to march with protesters, but did not spare a word for the ongoing police repression tactics. He also did not mention the editorial from Sen. Tom Cotton, published by the New York Timeshours before, calling for troops to be sent in on protestors.

Instead, focusing on a message of hope, Obama thanked youth leaders for prompting a necessary conversation. Just make sure that we now follow through, he said.

See more here:
Obama Sees Hope in Protests: There Is Something Different Here - Mother Jones

Former President Barack Obama speaks on the stage as he attends an Obama Foundation event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Dec. 13, 2019.

Photo: Zahim Mohd/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Dear Barack Obama:

I have heard that you will be speaking this evening in an online town hall on George Floyds killing and the topic of police reform. Im not in the habit of writing to presidents. Our struggle for justice is a power struggle, not simply a dialogue. But Im writing to you because, unlike our current president, you have at least adopted a stance of reason. And I hope that our reasonable exchange might offer guidance for others who are looking to understand recent events.

Your initial statement in response to Floyds killing revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of police in U.S. society. Because of that, Im offering my thoughts as an educator who sees an urgent need for massive political education in the context of an explosive uprising and intersecting oppressions about what you should say next.

In your May 29 statement on Floyds death, you amplified the words of 12-year-old Keedron Bryant, who sang a viral song about being a black man in America, and of your friend who identified with it.

Thank you for that. These were not simply examples of the trauma of racism as they are frequently presented, but also an important analysis of the interlocking systems of oppression that we are facing. Bryants lyric that African Americans are being hunted as prey, for example, reminded me of NYPD Lt. Edwin Raymonds complaint that he got tired of hunting Black and Hispanic people.

Bryants observance that this is happening every day, along with Raymonds lawsuit against the NYPD for discrimination, counter the idea that racial, extrajudicial state violence is the exception to the rule.

For this reason, I found myself anxious and disheartened when you said that the solution should include the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job, the right way, every day.

Your premise here, as I understand it, is that when police officers commit acts of racist violence, they are outliers, doing something other than the job they were hired to do that racist violence is a departure from the work that police officers are paid for and expected to do.

By presenting things this way during this time, I assume you are trying to avoid alienating police officers who see themselves and their work as a force for good. Their job is indeed challenging, and I know many officers understand their own work that way.

But it is frustrating to see you, an extremely influential African American public figure, refusing to grapple in a more serious, historical, and political way with what the job of the police actually is and how it contributes to our oppression.

A more historically informed and honest engagement with policing will have to confront a painful but urgent reality: The job of the modern police in America has been to reinforce a racist social order since its beginnings in the 19th century. Regardless of the good intentions of any individual police officer, the history, economic incentives, and culture of the police in every era, in every city in the United States, make this clear.

I understand that there may have been political reasons for your failure to engage in a more serious way when you were campaigning and acting as president, but you are under no such constraints right now.

Ive heard you say that you believe in reconciliation and redemption. But as Rev. William Barber told a crowd in Charleston, South Carolina, Before you have grace, there must be acknowledgement.

The institution of policing is saturated with the slogan to protect and to serve, but a deeper look at what police are trained and rewarded for can help us to understand what the real job of police is.

Derek Chauvin was doing his job when he arrested Floyd. You might feel that he didnt do his job well, but the police union will likely disagree with you. (Lt. Bob Kroll, the Minneapolis police union president, has said he is working to get Chauvin and the three other fired officers their jobs back.) It was not the job of the police to understand why Floyd may have been using a counterfeit $20 bill; it wasto ensure that he would be obedient even though he did not resist arrest.

It was also the job of the police to ensure the subservience of the others who courageously attempted to reason with Chauvin and save Floyds life.

Terrence Floyd attends a vigil where his brother George Floyd was murdered by police one week ago on June 1, 2020 in Minneapolis.

Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

When people hit the streets in outrage, it was the job of the police to enter their neighborhoods in armed trucks, with heavy tactical gear. This is not a small part of their job. You may be familiar with the 1997 bill, supported by your friend, former Vice President Joe Biden, that assisted police departments around the country in acquiring military gear and armed vehicles. The 1033 program helped to ship more than $7.4 billion worth of excess military equipment to over 8,000 police agencies across the country.

Even school districts have obtained weapons and tactical gear, such as rifles, extended magazines, automatic pistols, armored plating, tactical vests, SWAT gear, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and grenade launchers.Weapons such as these are now being deployed against citizens in cities across the country.

Police officers are trained in domestic counterinsurgency because this is their job. This is why the Minneapolis Police Department defied a ban from Mayor Jacob Frey in order to give its officers a warrior training.

When the police broke down the door of Breonna Taylors home in Louisville, Kentucky, to look for evidence in a narcotics investigation, they were doing their job. Taylor was an EMT. It was her job to save lives. But it was not the job of the police to protect her life. The Louisville Metro Police Department has responded by saying that the police officers did their job: they knocked on the door several times and announced themselves before entering Taylors home. What happened next, then, shooting 20 rounds in response to gunfire by Taylors boyfriend, including the eight bullets that entered her body, killing her while she was sleeping, was simply an unfortunate but necessary collateral damage of a job well-performed.

Former Glynn County detective Gregory McMichael told police that he suspected Ahmaud Arbery was a burglar. Perhaps, when he called his son Travis McMichael to hunt down and kill Arbery in the streets of Georgia, he felt so boldly empowered to do so because he saw it as a continuation of his job.

Such examples of police violence are often presented as anomalies, but they just scratch the surface of a much wider picture. An honest confrontation with the data destroys any myth of nonoppressive everyday policing. A recent Rutgers University study found that being killed by police is a leading cause of death in young men.

Statements like yours, about a tough but benign everyday policing meant to protect vulnerable citizens, are severely ahistorical. Your comments refuse to acknowledge a few things that happened under your administration.

In the the 23 days between July 17, the date that Eric Garner was killed, and August 9, 2014 as the Black Lives Matter movement was unfolding, police across the country killed 66 people, according to the Mapping Police Violence database .

It was yourJustice Departmenttask force that found that Fergusons municipal court primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the Citys financial interests in a way that violated the Constitution. In a city of 21,000, 16,000 people had outstanding arrest warrants, meaning that they are actively wanted by the police. This has tremendous implications for everyday policing.

In her book Punishment Without Crime, law professor Alexandra Natapoff describes a form that Baltimore police use to record trespassing arrests. It has a blank space for the name of the arrestee, but race and gender are already filled in as Black Male.

Modern police departments were not founded to protect citizens. They were founded to preserve and enforce social order within oppressive social hierarchy.

Boston founded what is commonly referred to as the first U.S. police department in 1838 a year when slavery was still legal in large parts of the country. But this starting point ignores the fact that, in the South, there were already institutions employing hundreds of people to surveil, catch, and punish enslaved black people.

Police departments continue to rewrite history. The Minneapolis Police Departments website claims that in previous eras, it was involved in battling labor disputes. This sanitizing and deceptive language conceals the fact that Minneapolis police entered struggles between workers fighting for their rights on the side of the employers. In 1934, for example, police officers shot at striking union workers, most of them in the back, and killed two, as MinnPost reported. Other such details about the Minneapolis Police Departments troubling history are included in a Peoples History of the MPD,released by an activist coalition called the MPD150.

Because the historical record of police violence is so conclusive, the only way proponents of policing can counter this history is by pointing out that some police officers are nice and occasionally do nice things.

Mr. President, if you were thinking of doing this, Id like to save you the trouble.

Despite my own rage about current events, I can acknowledge that some individual police officers are nice and well-meaning. But there are many nice people in ill-conceived organizations. The niceness of individual police officers, or their ability to take a knee, dance at cookouts, or fist-bump protesters, does not speak to the core function of their job. Police are paid for their capacity to suppress dissent and commit violence.

Those who try to work against this system often must risk their jobs to do so. For example, the NYPD 12 who sued the New York Police Department to end the use of racial quotas, were protesting a daily expectation of their jobs.

What is crucial to note is that in order to reduce their participation in racist state violence, these officers did not get back to everyday policing. Instead, to become a part of the solution these officers exposed precisely what makes the everyday policing of a police force with 36,000 officers an oppressive practice.

While establishment Democrats, including your administration, continue to argue that police reform is the solution against all historical and current evidence, a more realistic solution has emerged from organizers around the country: defunding the police and investing in community programs that actually reduce harm.

In the wake of George Floyds killing, groups like Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block have invited Minneapolis City Council members to sign onto a pledge.

Here are its demands:

In concert with these recommendations, the University of Minnesota has already limited its contractual relationships with the Minnesota Police Department. On Tuesday, Minnesota Public Schools voted to terminate its contract with the police department. Here in Philadelphia, where I live, groups like Movement Alliance Project have helped citizens flood the inboxes of city council members demanding that they reject a $14 million investment into policing that robs funds of social and cultural programs. In Los Angeles, over 1,000 health care workers released a statement rejecting the LAPD budget because of its investment in the LAPD over essential health and social programs.

The logical and evidence-based demand of defunding the police acknowledges that not every social institution can be reformed to serve the public, especially those that were conceived precisely for the opposite reason.

President Obama, you have always played an important role as educator-in-chief. I invite you to join us in offering a more historical and data-informed perspective on the problem of policing and the possible future that awaits us.

In the spirit of reason and justice,

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Continue reading here:
Getting Real About the Job of Police: A Letter to Barack Obama - The Intercept - First Look Media

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters.

When former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, Republicans launched attack after attack on special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation Rosenstein had overseen. But none of the lawmakers went nearly as deep into right-wing fantasyland as Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Cruz invoked President Donald Trumps invented claim that President Barack Obama was personally involved in ginning up aninvestigative witch-hunt into Trumps 2016 campaign.He then alleged that Obama, rather than Trump, was guilty of abuses worse than Watergate. What the Obama-Biden administration did in 2016-2017 makes everything Richard Nixon even contemplated pale in comparison, Cruz said.

Cruz was trying to reinforce Trumps effort to construct an alternative reality in which the current presidentsabusesincluding his campaigns effort to benefit from Russianelection interference and his attempt to pressure Ukraines president to announce a baseless investigation of Joe Bidenare somehow less serious than the imagined transgressions of his predecessor.

These claims are false. But allegations like Cruzs are so baseless, so divorced from the reality that exists outside Fox News and conservative news sites, that many other senators simply ignore them. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) perhaps because she hopes to be Bidens running matedidnt do that Wednesday, however. Instead, she railed against the hearing itself, portraying it as an absurd distraction from more important legislative priorities, including the coronavirus pandemic. Then she blasted Cruzs remarks.

We could also be doing so many other things on the pandemic, on the effect that the pandemic has had on immigration policy, Klobuchnar said. But we are here today. I thought that was absurd. But then I heard Senator Cruz. And I have to say, to compare Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, who left the White House in disgrace, to compare him with President Obama, who left the White House with grace and with dignity, something weve missed very much, especially this week, when we saw the President of the United States using the Bible as a prop in front of a church in Washington, DC, after the Justice Department tear-gassed peaceful protestors in order to set the stage for that press conference, no.

I would like the record to reflect that this comparison is not only wrong today, between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama, it will never stand the test of time.

Cruz, who CSpan showed sipping coffee as Klobuchar spoke, did not respond.

Read more:
Absurd: Amy Klobuchar Denounces Ted Cruz's Smear of Barack Obama - Mother Jones

WASHINGTON, D.C. (The Borowitz Report)After conducting a thorough inspection of the White House bunker on Friday night, Donald J. Trump discovered that the underground facility was covered in dust because Barack Obama never used it, Trump has confirmed.

There were dust bunnies everywhere, Trump told reporters. Obama was President for eight years, and he didnt set foot in that bunker once.

Here you have a world-class bunker, maybe the best bunker in the world, and Obama didnt use it, even once? Trump said. I think thats very disrespectful to the bunker.

Trump said that he opened the bunkers fridge and found it stocked to the brim with soft drinks, totally untouched.

What kind of a person has a well-stocked bunker and just stays upstairs at his desk working? Trump asked. A bad or sick guy.

Trump noted that, in addition to his failure to avail himself of an amazing bunker, Obama never once used the Insurrection Act of 1807 in his entire time in office.

I dont even know why Obama wanted to be President, Trump said. Obama is a mess.

Read the rest here:
Trump Says Inspection Revealed Bunker Was Dusty Because Obama Never Used It - The New Yorker

A large law enforcement response near the White House after a protest was dispersed on Monday.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

For the second straight week, peaceful daytime protests in response to the murder of George Floyd have given way to widespread, violent police suppression and sporadic looting by nightfall. Even in the past five years, the United States has seen similar uprisings against police brutality and similar state-sanctioned violence against protesters. But many have commented that this time feels somehow different. With millions out of work, hundreds of thousands hungry, more than 100,000 dead because of the unchecked COVID-19 pandemic, and a president who douses the violence in tear gas, there are some obvious explanations for why 2020 is different from 2015, or 2014, or 1992, or 1968.

Racism and police violence existed long before Donald Trump became president, but hes further emboldened police forces across the country. In addition to aligning himself rhetorically with police who commit brutality, Trump methodically dismantled the already limited federal checks on abusive police departments in the years before the Floyd uprising. If it feels like police officers across the country are acting with virtually total impunity, its because they have been granted that impunity by federal officials.

There are three key ways that Trumps Department of Justice has eroded or outright dismantled checks on abusive police departments in the past 3 years: First, it has all but ended the Barack Obamaera practice of placing police departments that violate constitutional rights under court-supervised consent decrees. These court-monitored settlements have, according to experts, offered some deterrent to police chiefs who do not want to see their departments placed under federal supervision. Second, it ended a voluntary federal-state collaborative reform program, over the opposition of police chiefsincluding Republicanswho embraced the initiative. Finally, it reversed limits on a program that has provided billions of dollars of military-grade vehicles and weaponssuch as grenade launchers and bayonetsto local police departments. These reforms were either introduced or escalated in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and the subsequent heavily armed police crackdown on Black Lives Matter protests. As soon as he took office, Trump has undone them one by one.

The political leadership of the Justice Department targeted the most effective parts of the police reform program and essentially prohibited them, said Chiraag Bains, the director of legal strategies for Demos and a former Civil Rights Division attorney who co-wrote the Ferguson report. I think you can see just how severe the absence of Justice Department oversight and intervention has been in the moment were in right now.

Its impossible, of course, to draw a causal link between the gutting of these programs and the current conflagration. Cities and states have much more direct control over police agencies than the federal government, and systemic racism has existed in this country since its founding. But weve seen recently how this presidents dismantling of seemingly minor systemic checks can have devastating consequences. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration closed the National Security Councils pandemic response unit, withdrew the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions China expert whose job it was to track novel disease outbreaks, shelved the previous administrations pandemic response playbook, and dismissed a transition briefing on pandemic danger. Preserving these programs might not have stopped COVID-19 from spreading to the U.S., but they could have helped the administration get an earlier handle on the problem, as many other countries did, and saved thousands of lives.

Like how Trumps dismantling of pandemic-response systems clearly exacerbated the coronavirus crisis, the impact of the DOJs dismantling of its own tools to rein in corrupt police departments is being felt today. The lack of oversight is obvious as police across the United States assault and arrest peaceful protesters, domestic and foreign journalists, people standing on their own property, 70-year-old members of Congress, clergy, and old men with canes.

The reforms implemented by the previous administration were not nearly enough to curtail systemic racist policing, but they did at least offer some mechanism of accountability. Start with the consent decreesthe court-monitored agreements between local police departments and federal or state officials that result in mandatory changes and benchmarks for departments that have violated citizens constitutional rights. Under a 1994 law, the attorney general has the right to sue local police departments that have engaged in constitutional abuses. Under Obama, the Department of Justice used that power to threaten localities with lawsuits and get them to agree to voluntary court-supervised oversight. The Obama administration opened 25 investigations of police departments that resulted in at least 15 consent decrees leading to court oversight of police departments in cities ranging from Chicago to Ferguson to Baltimore. In municipalities across the country, the DOJ mandates have included bias training and official monitoring of incidents of bias, independent investigations of use-of-force incidents, de-escalation training, and limits on how and when police can interact with citizens. At the very least, these departments understood they were being watched and had to regularly report progress to a judge.

After significant lobbying from police unions that have supported Trump, the Department of Justice undid these reforms. In his second month in office, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of all consent decrees and placed roadblocks to existing decrees. On his last week on the job, Sessions issued a memorandum imposing strict limits on new consent decrees and preventing enhancements to current ones. He demanded that new decrees and changes to existing ones be approved by political leadership rather than career attorneys, required proof of violations other than constitutional abuses, and ordered sunset dates for all new agreements. These moves effectively closed the door to new consent decrees and placed severe limitations on current ones.

Dramatically, the Sessions DOJ even refused to go forward with a consent decree of the Chicago Police Department after the Obama administration had already issued a report finding systemic abuses in the wake of the murder of Laquan McDonald. You were in a place where a department had been thoroughly investigated by Department of Justice attorneys, there were findings of constitutional violations, and still this administration literally abandoned this effort, said Lynda Garcia, one of the DOJ Civil Rights Divisions Chicago investigators who is now the policing campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. After the state of Illinois took the Obama DOJs report and enacted its own consent decree with Chicago, Sessions department took the unprecedented step of filing with the court in opposition to the state-local consent decree. It was a jaw-dropping moment when the Department of Justice weighed in on a state-level matter to try and intervene to prevent an agreement between the state government and the local government to correct constitutional violations, Garcia noted. It was not within their jurisdiction. It was a real show of where they stand and that they are actually working to impede police accountability and reform.

While consent decrees are not and have never been a panacea, they at least offered some mechanism to keep the most egregious police departments in check. The absence of the possibility of a DOJ investigation has been extremely harmful as a deterrent to misconduct, Bains said. Under the old rules, the Minneapolis Police Departmentwith its history of killings of unarmed black menmight now be facing a consent decree demanding court-ordered reforms. Senators have called on the DOJ to launch an investigation into the patterns and practices of the department to discern if Floyds killing was part of a bigger problem (the available evidence suggests that it is), and the state of Minnesota on Tuesday filed civil rights charges against the department. But the DOJ has continued to forswear its own role.

Right now, youre seeing calls for a pattern and practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department, Bains said. This Justice Department has completely walked away from this work. It would be helpful to have a Justice Department that stayed active on police reform and had the infrastructure and the ability to get involved in this case.

Even if Attorney General William Barr wanted to reverse course, the Civil Rights Division has been so hollowed out that enforcing the law would be very difficult. The unit that does these pattern and practice investigations was small to begin with, and now its been cut in half due to attrition and failure to hire people to fill slots, Bains noted. (As Garcia also pointed out, Barr has said that communities that protest abusive police should lose policing protections altogether, and the DOJ said he personally ordered Trumps attack on protesters in front of the White House on Monday, so it seems unlikely he would change the departments position here.)

Critically, the police also have access to an even greater arsenal to respond to peaceful protesters thanks to the Trump administrations reinstatement of a military surplus giveaway. Near the start of his term, Trump reversed Obama-imposed limits on a military program known as 1033 that allows the military to give surplus equipment to local police departments. The Pentagon said 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers and 1,623 bayonets had been returned since Mr. Obama prohibited their transfer, the New York Times reported in 2017. Tanks dont belong on our city streets. They belong in combat, Garcia said. Since Trump rescinded Obamas ban, those weapons and equipment have flowed freely back to local departments that are now using them to assault lawful protesters. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a handful of libertarian-minded Republican and independent members of Congress have indicated a willingness to join with Democrats to undo the program through legislation. It likely wont be enough, though, to actually move the needle. The easy access to weapons is just one factor in the militarization of police.

Finally, in November 2017 the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice under Sessions hadover the opposition of local sheriffssignificantly scaled back a voluntary program called the collaborative reform initiative that allowed sheriffs to request DOJ funding and logistical support in analyzing and proposing reforms of their departments. The Times reported that multiple Republican and pro-Trump sheriffs from Spokane, Washington, to Fort Pierce, Florida, were frustrated that they had invested their departments time to be assessed by independent collaborators in this voluntary program, but would now be denied even access to the resulting reports. That was an even more shameful situation because there were police departments that never got reports that were due to them because the program was shut down, Bains said. They had worked with [that] office for months and months, turned over data and submitted to interviews, spent a lot of time with the [program] office, and never got their final report and recommendations, which they really sincerely wanted because they were trying to reform their practices and build trust with the communities that they serve.

Ultimately, none of these initiatives was a silver bullet for police brutality and systemic racism in law enforcement. As many activists have noted, criminal abuses by police officers were rampant while Obama was president. The threat of accountability, the loss of military weapons, and a voluntary police reform program would almost certainly not have been enough to stop George Floyds murderer and his accomplices from taking Floyds life. But as with the pandemic, the fire is growing faster and spreading wider than it might have otherwise. As Garcia noted, the administrations rhetoric and its dismantling of these reform efforts send messages to police that they can do whatever they want.

Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary, and criticism you wont find anywhere else.

See more here:
How the Trump Administration Undid Obamas Response to Ferguson - Slate