POLICE STATE USA, OBAMA'S
FEDERALIZATION OF POLICE GROWS NATIONWIDE, White
House: 53 departments sign on to federal oversight, by Cheryl Chumley, 4/21/16
Announced Friday, 53 police
departments around the country have signed on so far to the White House-pressed
Police Data Initiative, a plan by President Obama to make crime-fighting more
technology-driven and accountable to higher-ups, but that is seen by critics as
a not-so-subtle federal takeover of community policing.
The program, which comes by way of a
recommendation from the Task Force on 21st Century Policing that Obama launched
in December – which was created by the White House in response to widely
reported instances of police-community clashes and alleged cop discrimination
against minorities – is aimed at enhancing “data transparency and analysis”
among police departments around the nation.
In White
House jargon, according to a May 2015 “Launching
the Police Data Initiative press release: “Through the initiative, key
stakeholders are establishing a community of practice that will allow for
knowledge sharing, community-sourced problem solving and the establishment of
documented best practices that can serve as examples for police departments
nationwide.”
The ultimate goal? “Increased trust
and impact,” the White House reported. The initiative in 2015 kicked off in
Camden, New Jersey, a “predominantly black city” that’s “one of America’s most
violent and also among its poorest,” Newsone
reported. Then, 20 other communities joined on to the program as
well, which included training from federal authorities on how to gather and use
data to “increase transparency, build community trust and support innovation,”
the White House reported.
But it’s grown. Now, the number of
participating police departments has jumped to 53.
And critics say it’s little more
than a federalization of local police because it puts the White House at the
helm of deciding such matters as cameras on cop uniforms and whether or not
local jurisdictions accept equipment from the military.
Critics also say the data that’s
being gathered at the local levels will lead to a massive federal database,
overseen by federal authorities, who will then decide whether the individual
police department is pursuing crime-fighting techniques in a manner that
doesn’t discriminate against minorities.
As the New
American put it back in March of 2015:
“The plan will use U.S. taxpayer dollars to deploy ‘experts’ and ‘researchers’
charged with training officers to act in a manner that the [Department of
Justice] deems just – in essence doing the bidding of the Obama administration.
Officially, the Justice Department will be helping local officials ‘fight
crime’ under the scheme.”
And as the Blaze
reported in August of 2015: “President
Barack Obama’s administration has begun the second phase in federalizing the
police.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch
underscored in October 2015 the need for the federal government to collect data
from local police departments, in order to “improve the accuracy and
consistency” of how cops conduct their business.
“The [DOJ’s] position and the
administration’s position has consistently been that we need to have national,
consistent data,” she said, in a statement
on the Justice Department website.
“This information is useful because it helps us see trends, it helps us promote
accountability and transparency. We’re also going further in developing
standards for publishing information about deaths in custody as well, because
transparency and accountability are helped by this kind of national data.”
http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/obamas-federalization-of-police-grows-nationwide/
No comments:
Post a Comment