BLACK
HISTORY
February 22, 2017
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MONTH
Page 11
O PINION
The End of an Alliance for Police Reform
White House
ridicules
accountability
by
e bony
s laughter -J ohnson
In
July
2016,
then-Attorney Gener-
al Loretta Lynch com-
mitted the Department
of Justice to investi-
gating the shooting
of Alton Sterling, a black man
who was murdered by police
outside a convenience store in
Baton Rouge.
The move represented the
deepening of a tangible (if ten-
uous) relationship between the
Department of Justice and the
Black Lives Matter movement,
which gained national promi-
nence in 2014 after the police
shooting of Eric Garner.
Until this year, civil rights
advocates and critics of police
violence had allies in both the
Department of Justice and the
White House — one of whom
was President Obama himself.
At a minimum, these allies
were sympathetic to the fight
for racial justice. Not infre-
quently, they were willing
to expend their institutional
resources to secure it. The
fruits of this relationship in-
cluded a series of damning
reports on police misconduct
from Ferguson, Missouri to
Cleveland, Chicago,
San Francisco, and
Baltimore.
In the age of
Trump, that alliance
has come to an end.
In the false dichoto-
my between holding
police accountable and advo-
cating for communities of col-
or, Trump has made it clear that
his administration will come
down on the side of the police.
Under Trump, the official
White House website now rid-
icules the movement for police
accountability as an effort to
“to make life more comfortable
for the rioter, the looter, or the
violent disrupter.” In the Trump
administration’s version of the
world, protesters are disorderly
agitators whose demands for
justice only interfere with the
work of good men and women
in blue.
If law enforcement has
found a new friend in Trump,
it’s consistently had one in Jeff
Sessions, the Alabama senator
11830 Kerr Pkwy. 97035
Noon-7pm,
or by appointment: 503-830-7616
just confirmed as attorney gen-
eral — during Black History
Month, no less.
As a senator, Sessions pub-
lished an opinion on consent
decrees, which are agreements
local departments make with
Washington to reform polic-
ing practices that violate their
citizens’ rights. Sessions called
those deals “dangerous.”
In 2015, Sessions participat-
ed in a Senate hearing provoc-
atively titled “The War on
Police,” during which he lam-
basted the Obama administra-
tion’s aggressive investigations
into police misconduct. He
called those actions evidence
of “an agenda that’s been a
troubling issue for a number of
years.”
During his confirmation
hearings, Sessions again reit-
erated his disdain for consent
decrees, claiming that they
“undermine respect for our po-
lice officers” and testifying that
he might be interested in doing
away with them altogether.
Nor has Sessions ever both-
ered to hide his disdain for
civil rights activists. At the
same 2015 hearing, Sessions
chastised, “I do think it’s a real
problem when we have Black
Lives Matter making state-
ments that are really radical,
that are absolutely false.”
Trump’s censure of the
movement has been even more
provocative. After lamenting
the murders of Philando Cas-
tile and Alton Sterling as “ter-
rible” in the summer of 2016,
Trump quickly changed his
tune. He condemned police re-
form advocates for “dividing
the country” and blamed them
for the murders of two police
officers in Baton Rouge.
Candidate Trump went so far
as to claim that he’d charge his
attorney general with leading
an investigation into the Black
Lives Matter movement — an
assignment that Sessions, by
the looks of things, would en-
thusiastically accept.
There will be more police
shootings of black men in the
future. There will be more pro-
tests that call for justice for
these victims. But with a De-
partment of Justice led by Jeff
Sessions, people who want jus-
tice will be on their own.
Ebony Slaughter-Johnson is
a freelance writer whose work
covers history, race, and the
criminalization of poverty. Dis-
tributed by OtherWords.org.