https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-administration-america-safety-law-enforcement
Upon being nominated in 2021 to head Joe Biden’s Justice Department, Merrick Garland announced that the DOJ’s top priorities would be “ensuring racial equity” and “meeting the evolving threat of violent extremism.”
The U.S. had just lived through race riots, mass looting, and the largest annual homicide increase in the country’s history. Americans were getting robbed at gunpoint while eating in restaurants; thieves were smashing trucks and SUVs into storefronts to make off with merchandise, cash registers, and ATMs.
But when Garland and his boss referred to violent extremism, they were referring to white supremacists. “The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy,” President Joe Biden said at Howard University’s commencement in May 2023, “and I’m not saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say it wherever I go.”
He wasn’t kidding. “Our own intelligence agencies in the United States of America have determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat to our Homeland today,” Biden said in September 2022 at a White House Summit on combating hate. The Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies regularly issued alerts about looming outbreaks of white supremacist violence. Those outbreaks never materialized, including those predicted for Election Day 2024.
Fighting largely phantom white supremacy was just one of the Biden administration’s obsessions that diverted it from the core duty of government: maintaining law and order. The Trump administration should reverse all identity-based policies from the Biden era and refocus federal law enforcement agencies on combating crime and illegal immigration. Doing so will guarantee an improvement in public safety.
The Biden administration made race and ethnicity the key factor in crucial criminal justice positions. By March 2022, 48 percent of Biden’s picks for U.S. attorney positions were black, though only 13 percent of the U.S. population is black.
This disparity would be worrisome enough in its own right: turning any irrelevant characteristic into a selection criterion guarantees an inferior pool of candidates. But given the academic skills gap, such a large racial preference means an even larger sacrifice of meritocratic standards. Twenty-two percent of black law graduates never pass the bar exam after five tries, for example, compared with 3 percent of white test takers. State bar associations are lowering pass scores on bar examinations in the hope of qualifying more black attorneys. Black LSAT scores and law school class rankings are at the bottom of distribution curve.