RUTHFULLY YOURS

The most important statement in the Justice Department’s damning report on the Chicago Police Department has nothing to do with police behavior. Released on Friday, the report found the Chicago police guilty of a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional force. But it turns out that the Justice Department has no standard for what constitutes a “pattern or practice” (the phrase comes from a 1994 federal statute) of unconstitutional police conduct. “Statistical evidence is not required” for a “pattern or practice” finding, the DOJ lawyers announce, citing unrelated court precedent. Nor is there “a specific number of incidents” required to constitute a “pattern or practice,” they proclaim.

Having cleared themselves of any obligation to provide “a specific number of [unconstitutional] incidents” or a statistical benchmark for evaluating them, the DOJ attorneys proceed to ignore any further obligation of transparency. The reader never learns how many incidents of allegedly unconstitutional behavior the Justice Department found, nor how those incidents compare with the universe of police-civilian contacts conducted by the Chicago Police Department. No clue is provided regarding why the DOJ lawyers concluded that the alleged abuses reached the mysterious threshold for constituting a pattern or practice. Instead, the report uses waffle words like “several,” “often,” or “many” as a substitute for actual quantification. This vacuum of information hasn’t stopped the mainstream media from trumpeting the report as yet another exposé of abusive, racist policing. EXCESSIVE FORCE IS RIFE IN CHICAGO, U.S. REVIEW FINDs, read the headline on the New York Times’s front-page story, which went on to note that the excessive force was “chiefly aimed at African-Americans and Latinos.”

The report does disclose that the DOJ attorneys reviewed 425 incidents of less-than-lethal force between January 2011 and April 2016. But what proportion of total force incidents those 425 events represent or how many of those 425 incidents the federal lawyers found unconstitutional isn’t revealed. As to how many stops and arrests were made over that same time period that didn’t involve the use of force, the reader can only guess.

We also learn that the federal civil rights team identified 203 officer-involved shootings between January 1, 2011, and March 21, 2016. How many of those were bad shootings? Fifteen? One hundred? The reader is left in the dark. The massive New York Police Department averaged 48 shootings a year from 2005 to 2015. The per-capita rate of officer shootings in the NYPD is therefore much lower than in the Chicago Police Department, which is about a third the size. But Chicago’s crime rate is much higher than New York’s; CPD officers confront many more armed and resisting suspects. It would have been useful to know how the ratio of officer-involved shootings to criminal shootings in Chicago compares to other cities. We don’t even learn how many of those 203 officer-involved shootings in Chicago were lethal.

The absence of any quantified evidence for DOJ’s judgment of systemic abuse is all the more significant, since it was only yesterday that Chicago law enforcement was the darling of the left-wing academic establishment. In 2010, the New York City Bar Association held a forum on the New York Police Department, during which Columbia University law professor Jeffrey Fagan and Yale University law professor Tracey Meares both touted the Chicago department as a model that the big, bad NYPD should emulate. (I participated on that bar panel as well.) Meares and her Yale colleague Tom Tyler have used the Chicago Police Department as a laboratory for their concept of “procedural justice and legitimacy.” The Obama administration’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing incorporated the procedural justice idea from Chicago into its May 2015 report; the Justice Department distributes the Chicago procedural justice curriculum to other departments, according to Time magazine. John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor David Kennedy worked with Chicago on his theory of violence reduction. Garry McCarthy, who was superintendent of the Chicago Police Department during the period covered by the DOJ’s report, presented himself as a “reform” commander focused on community relations, and he was received as such by academia and the media. The Chicago PD’s extensive collaboration with academic researchers was the hot topic during a November 2015 conference of the American Society of Criminology, reports Time.

https://quadrant.org.au/

Yea, we must surely be at the End of Days, when improbable amities and alliances will blossom hither and yon, as they have been doing these past two months in Washington. Consider the portents:

After decades of making excuses for Moscow, the Western left now presents the Kremlin as the greatest threat to all mankind.
After decades of denouncing the imperialist machinations of the CIA, the spy agency is now the go-to source of geopolitical wisdom and must be trusted absolutely by all intelligent people everywhere.

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this article, the White House announced on Tuesday that Oscar Lopez-Rivera’s sentence would be commuted.

As Barack Obama begins the last week of his presidency, speculation about potential candidates for an eleventh-hour presidential pardon has inevitably heated up. And one name that has been bandied about should send a particularly unpleasant chill down the spines of law-abiding Americans everywhere: Oscar Lopez-Rivera.

Lopez-Rivera has been in federal prison since 1981, after he was convicted of seditious conspiracy and arms trafficking in connection with his leadership of the FALN, the notorious left-wing terrorist group that perpetrated more than 130 attacks on U.S. soil from the mid 1970s through the mid 1980s, killing six and wounding many more. Most members of the FALN, which purported to fight for Puerto Rican independence but maintained deep ties to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, were long ago captured and imprisoned, and many of them have already served their time and been released. But Lopez-Rivera remains unrepentant about his crimes, and he’s hardly been a model prisoner: In one of two failed attempts to escape, he conspired with others inside and outside his prison to kill his way to freedom, attempting to procure grenades, rifles, plastic explosives, bulletproof vests, blasting caps, and armor-piercing bullets. After the FBI thwarted this plan, another 15 years was added to Lopez’s original 55-year sentence.

Then, in 1999, President Bill Clinton stunned the world by offering clemency to twelve FALN members, including Lopez, without notifying the families of the FALN’s victims beforehand. Eric Holder, at the time a deputy attorney general in Clinton’s Justice Department, had been trying to free the imprisoned radicals for two years. When then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s staff thought freeing the terrorists might help her pick up the significant Puerto Rican voting bloc in her N.Y. Senate race, they reached out to Holder for an assist. Holder came up with a statement the terrorists would have to sign expressing remorse for their actions, Mrs. Clinton met with an advocate for the group who passed along documents to assist with the clemency, she gave the documents to her husband, and just two days later President Clinton made the surprise announcement.

The plan quickly began to implode when both branches of Congress overwhelmingly condemned it and the administration failed to get all twelve terrorists to agree to its conditions. As a 30-day deadline to accept the offer approached, eleven of the twelve prisoners signed on, walking free as a stunned nation watched. Lopez-Rivera was the only prisoner to decline the administration’s offer.

I contended in last weekend’s column that the Justice Department’s inspector-general investigation, focusing on statements by FBI director James Comey in the stretch-run of the presidential campaign, is part of a carefully orchestrated Democratic scheme to win the narrative battle over the 2016 election. The inquiry into whether Director Comey’s disclosures about the Clinton e-mails investigation violated DOJ standards is merely a pretext. The real objective is to bolster the claim that Donald Trump’s triumph was illegitimate, thus undermining his presidency.

The same strategy informs the Democrats’ continued repetition of the theme that “Russia hacked the election.” Notwithstanding that Putin’s regime did not tamper with the actual voting process and that the embarrassing information released by WikiLeaks (mostly e-mails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta) was true, Democrats are determined to depict President Trump not as elected fair-and-square by Americans but as maneuvered into the White House by Russian “cyber-espionage.”

Now it’s the same old wine in a different bottle.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently considering Trump’s nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) to be attorney general. On Tuesday, all nine Democrats on the committee signed a letter demanding that, if confirmed, Sessions recuse himself from any investigation of efforts by Russia to interfere in the election.

Let’s once again take a step back and understand what’s going on here.

If Russia merely tried to interfere in an American election, there is no basis to call for Sessions’s recusal. There is no reason to question Sessions’s motivation and commitment to investigate and prosecute espionage by Putin’s regime. The purported conflict of interest would arise only if we accept the narrative — i.e., the fiction — that “Russia hacked the election.” Had that actually happened, then it could be credibly claimed that Trump owes his presidency, and Sessions his stewardship of the Justice Department, to Russian espionage. That would be a major conflict of interest. Thus, Democrats want Sessions to concede, in effect, that he has a powerful motive to conceal Russia’s espionage — such that he must recuse himself because we cannot trust him to lead a fair and impartial investigation. Implicitly, Sessions would be conceding — and thus cementing — the fiction that “Russia hacked the election.”

In other words, the Democrats’ latest recusal ploy has nothing to do with Sessions, just as the IG investigation has nothing to do with Comey. The objective is to engrave a story on the election: The Democrats lost not because their candidate was terrible and their policies unpopular; they lost because Russia stole the election for Trump — rendering Trump illegitimate, and implicitly obliging Americans to resist him as a Putin puppet.