During National Police Week, Biden celebrated betrayal of cops

Last week was National Police Week, a weeklong event which brings local officers from around the country to the nation’s capital, and which culminates in Peace Officers Memorial Day, in which Americans remember local law enforcement killed in the line of duty.

President Joe Biden took the opportunity in his issued proclamation to pat himself on the back for his administration’s continued efforts to undermine and demoralize local police.

Perhaps Biden should have called it “Nationalizing the police” week, as the president paraded a litany of federally funded golden handcuffs his administration has foisted upon local law enforcement agencies, touting the “largest Federal investment in public safety in our history” through American Rescue Plan funds.

But Biden also celebrated his administration’s investment in “crisis responders,” a radical progressive effort to replace law enforcement with unarmed social workers, a move widely panned by pro-police advocates and initially proposed by radical police abolitionists and championed by deep blue cities like Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis where Antifa and BLM rioters ran rampant in 2020, and which now face skyrocketing violent crime.

Biden did not mention however his administration’s aggressive push to have the Department of Justice target and investigate local law enforcement agencies. In an Executive Order authored in May of 2022, Biden promoted the creation of a federal database of “police misconduct” and called for a massive expansion of so-called “practice or pattern” investigations, in which the lawyers of Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division  regularly allege that agencies violate civil rights when there are variances between policing outcomes and demographic data, regardless of any evidence of ill intent or the reasonableness of the justification for the difference, including following data on actual crime statistics.

DOJ often imposes consent decrees upon local governments in order to extend federal control over policing and enforce insanely costly police oversight bureaucracies on local jurisdiction. Under the Trump Administration, the abuse of consent decrees by the Department of Justice saw some reform when in 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions instituted requirements such as sunset clauses, to prevent decrees from being used to violate local sovereignty indefinitely. The Department of Justice under the Trump administration issued only one such decree, while the prior Obama Administration had issued more than two dozen. In just two years the Biden administration’s DOJ has already opened 8 such cases.

But the Biden Administration’s hostility to police goes still further, with Biden publicly advocating last December for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which as Detroit Police Chief James Craig has said would “decimate” policing in America.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would allow the Department of Justice to more easily convict police officers accused of civil rights violations by lowering the criminal intent standard from “willful” to “knowing or reckless”. This would essentially allow the DOJ to treat evidence of disparity in policing outcomes as de facto criminal civil rights violations.

The Act would also weaken qualified immunity from officers in civil suits. Qualified immunity limits the ability to sue police officers for actions conducted in the course of their duties when conducted in accordance with the policies and procedures set forth by their agency. In other words, it limits the ability to sue officers when they do their job in the manner they’ve been instructed to do it.

Police officers who violate policies and disregard the law are still open to lawsuits, as they should be, unlike other components of the legal system, such as prosecutors and judges, who enjoy total immunity. This is why Soros-backed radical leftist prosecutors cannot be sued for letting violent criminals go free.  The act would also allow the DOJ to subpoena police agencies as a mere administrative action, which will the DOJ’s ongoing inquisition against cops.

Morale for local law enforcement has hit bottom basement levels. Many jurisdictions are struggling to fill officer positions. Many officers currently on duty are anxious to retire. The “Ferguson Effect”, coined by The War on Cops author Heather Macdonald is real, and many officers are reluctant to police assertively –fearing rogue district attorneys, fickle municipal leadership, and rapacious lawsuits.  All this leaves Americans even more at risk in an environment where criminals are already being allowed to roam free thanks to disastrous bail reform policies and radical prosecutors.

Meanwhile, just days after National Police Week came to an end CBS News took the opportunity to slander local elected law enforcement officers with the headline “County sheriffs wield lethal power, face little accountability” calling law enforcement leaders actually elected by the people “a failure of democracy” in an article featuring quotes from former Biden DOJ officials. In reality there are few remaining institutions in America as respected as that of county sheriff.

There are few who disagree with the notion that law enforcement officers by their very nature exercises significant power, and thus the office requires transparency and responsibility. The debate is whether the power of policing Americans belongs Washington, with increasingly unaccountable and weaponized Department of Justice bureaucrats, or with local governments, directly responsible to their constituents.