Order to Stop Crimes Agains Law Enforcement
By Jeffery Robinson
Something does not add upwards.
President Trump put an executive order into effect last week to, in his words, "finish offense and crimes of violence against law enforcement officers." Only when the facts about police, violence and victims are considered — real facts, not alternative facts — the math doesn't work. Like Winston Smith in George Orwell'due south 1984, nosotros are beingness asked to believe that two plus two does non equal four.
An unnecessary executive order
Despite horrific videos of police violence combined with overwhelming prove of decades of such abuse, Trump has chosen to focus instead on the far less frequent violence against police officers. Rather than work to relieve the public from unnecessary state violence, which would go a long style to improving the trust between police and the communities they serve, he has directed the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to consider expanding the criminal lawmaking and "establishing new mandatory minimum sentences for existing crimes of violence confronting constabulary enforcement officers." He does this even though laws already exist that impose the strictest penalties for killing a police force officer.
If making America safe is the true goal, what facts led the president to decide that significant time, money and effort should become toward additional protections for police instead of protections for people of color, who are often targeted past constabulary? Are police being killed at a college charge per unit than in the past? Is this why America is not safe?
Here are the facts: Co-ordinate to National Police force Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund i,439 officers have been killed in the line of duty over the past 10 years — that's an boilerplate of 144 deaths per twelvemonth.
Preliminary reports from the FBI show that 41 law enforcement officers were maliciously killed in 2015. That's downwardly virtually 20% from 2014, when 51 officers were intentionally killed. Threescore-four officers were shot and killed in 2016, including the shootings that made national headlines in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
Every killing of a police officer is a terrible tragedy. But the bottom line is that officer deaths accept dropped overall since the 1970s, with the number of officers killed on duty falling roughly past half during that time, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
Civilians at greater risk
If the president wasn't busy spinning fiction, he would take more time to pay attention to the mounting number of people of color being killed by police.
Co-ordinate to the Guardian, 1,146 people — armed and unarmed — were killed by police in 2015. The total number of law enforcement officer deaths from 2011 through 2015 was 662. In the world of real facts, these statistics may justify a federal examination of police violence, but that is non what the president proposed. Indeed, Trump has managed to brand multiple speeches about violence in America with petty to no mention of victims of police violence, in number or past proper noun.
This is not about existence anti-law or pro-police.
Ane law officer killed in the line of duty is one too many, and we know that policing tin exist a dangerous job. Of course there are steps that can be taken to make police officers and the communities they serve safer. Dorsum in 2014, President Obama did just that with an executive society creating the Task Forcefulness on 21st Century Policing. Its mission? Fix the rifts between local police force and their communities in Ferguson, Mo., and around the country. A sentence from the Obama administration'due south chore force announcement summed the goals up all-time: "As the nation has observed, trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve is essential to the stability of our communities, the integrity of our criminal justice organization, and the prophylactic and effective delivery of policing services."
The resulting task force included representatives from law enforcement and customs organizations, and information technology produced robust recommendations to forge collaborative relationships between the police force and the public to increase prophylactic. They proposed training for police officers in de-escalation and racial bias. These steps are serious, fact-based solutions that are not easy but volition have an touch.
Why not start with policies that take been put in identify to solve problems that actually be?
Creating a working group to address an imaginary trend is similar telling you that two plus ii is non four. George Orwell described it clearly.
The route to sane criminal justice policy is not paved with alternative facts. Two plus ii is four, fifty-fifty if the president says otherwise.
Jeffery Robinson is ACLU Deputy Legal Managing director and Director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality
Source: https://www.davisvanguard.org/2017/02/executive-order-stop-crimes-law-enforcement-lacks-facts/
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