RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/unable-to-run-its-own-agencies-washington-dictates-to-americas-police/

The federal government cannot even run its own limited law-enforcement missions properly. Where does it get off micro-managing policing on a nationwide scale?

Here’s a laugh: Washington intends to tell New York how to do policing.

The federal government has one premier law-enforcement agency, the FBI, and a sprawl of more specialized police forces — DEA, ATF, IRS’s criminal-investigation division, etc. These bureaucracies are dwarfed in size and scope by big-city municipal police departments, such as the NYPD. They are also, to be blunt about it, reeling at the moment because they don’t do their jobs very well: long on politicized arm-twisting, short on due process.

The FISA court recently found federal intelligence agencies guilty of an “institutional lack of candor” in dealing with the tribunal. That conclusion has only been bolstered by Justice Department reports outlining stunning abuses of power by the FBI, serial lying and leaking by top officials, fabrication of evidence, and investigations launched on a dearth of predication and furthered by entrapment tactics and perjury traps. We never did get to the bottom of the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” scandal, in which the ATF allowed illegal firearms transfers into Mexico — evidently hoping to fuel a political narrative against the Second Amendment but succeeding only in fueling violent Mexican gang crime that claimed the life of a border-patrol agent. A federal appeals court echoed a district judge in New Orleans, who was appalled when Obama Justice Department lawyers anonymously led a race-baiting press campaign to undermine the trial rights of indicted police officers and then misled and stonewalled investigators who tried to find out what happened. And speaking of misleading and stonewalling, they explain why we never got accountability for the bare-knuckles tactics the IRS used to harass conservative groups.

It is a measure of how frightfully irrational our times are that the “defund the police” campaign led by Democrats and Black Lives Matter activists is thriving. It has moved to the mainstream of progressive politics even as the need for effective policing becomes ever more palpable.

We are not talking just about the rampage that followed the horrific killing of George Floyd, which sent Minneapolis and many other big city hot spots spiraling into rioting and looting. The warning signs have been there for a few years, obscure at first but increasingly easy to see.

A new breed of progressive prosecutors, many of them backed by the George Soros network and other deep-pocketed leftwing organizations, has taken control in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and other urban centers.

Philosophically, they see policing, prosecution and imprisonment as triggers of crime, rather than deterrents against it. They’ve targeted law-enforcement techniques rather than lawbreakers. They adamantly reject the intelligence-based policing and broken windows policies that have given us a generation of record low crime. They’ve eliminated cash bail, which means mandatory release for nonviolent crimes – with a very elastic definition of “nonviolent.”

Once again, we are seeing “That ’70s Show,” not the TV program but the phenomenon no one sensible ever wanted to see again: the one where the criminals are back out on the street making mayhem before the police can even finish the paperwork processing the last arrest. Pretty soon, the arrests slow to a trickle, even as the crime increases. Making arrests can be dangerous, and no one wants to take the risk over a pointless gesture.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/09/the-suicide-of-expertise/

After misleading Americans on a long list of consequential issues over the past few decades—from climate change to dietary guidelines and now the common cry of “systemic racism”—the body of expertise is twitching. In this case, I will even allow for coding its death as another coronavirus fatality.

In his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise, author Tom Nichols argued that know-it-all Americans were tuning out the credentialed class at great risk to the country. “We rely on delegating decisions to other people who we assume are going to have some better knowledge of these issues than we are,” he said in an April 2017 speech. “Our republic functions on delegating decisions to others who rely on expertise to help make the best decisions we can make.”

Nichols, a rabid NeverTrumper, often ridicules Trump and his supporters as ignorant rubes who recklessly disregard the advice of Our Betters with Letters. Blaming experts for disastrous foreign wars or lousy trade pacts, Nichols insists, is just a craven political strategy. It is inconceivable to him that disgust with the expert class could be rooted in legitimate gripes or clear evidence of failure.

But like so many assumptions made by his NeverTrump cohorts, Nichols is wrong. Again. Expertise did not die at the hands of deplorable Trumpkins or even web-surfing suburban moms. Expertise wasn’t killed; it has slowly committed suicide.

And we are watching the final death throes of the credentialed class as the last gasps of their credibility can be heard across social media and cable news outlets. The tension between two forms of pseudoscience—social distancing and social justice—snapped, and the experts who vehemently demanded the former now take a knee to defend the latter.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-and-death-in-chicago-11591732693?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Do America’s cities need police? Some progressives want to replace police with social workers, but we doubt that includes the people in Chicago who witnessed or were victimized by a crime rampage on a recent single day in Murder City, U.S.A.

Eighteen people in Chicago were murdered on May 31, marking the city’s most violent day in at least 60 years. Over the span of that spring weekend, 85 people were shot, 24 fatally. As rioters ransacked businesses across the city, gangs exploited the chaos and the overstretched police force to steal and kill.

“We’ve never seen anything like it, at all,” Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “When [the police department] has to turn its attention elsewhere and there’s suddenly this vacuum that opens up, you also unfortunately see a picture like you saw with [last] weekend where you see an absurd amount of carnage, people getting injured and killed.”