Highlights:
Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of all agreements between the Justice Department and local police departments around the country. Sessions wrote that “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” and said the DOJ might “pull back” on federal oversight responsibilities under Donald Trump. […] What Sessions is suggesting means literally going back to a Fifties-era conception of the Justice Department’s role in preventing local police abuse. If Sessions has his way, he will holster the most powerful weapon the government has in addressing tragedies like the Garner incident: federal civil rights laws.
[…] Rogers wrote a memo very similar in tone to the one Sessions just wrote. He declared that the federal government should not intervene in local controversies and file civil rights charges absent “compelling circumstances.” In practice, the Rogers memo meant that, provided there had been some kind of local due process, no matter how flawed, the feds wouldn’t step in and take a second whack at an offender in a race killing or a police brutality case.
[…] The Trump administration is pushing for steep cuts to the Justice Department budget, including the outright elimination of funding for the Legal Services Corporation and Violence Against Women grants, as well as slashing up to a third of the Civil Rights Division’s budget.Sessions has already hinted that he will stop investigating local police departments. Coupled with the budget cuts, we can probably expect the feds to get out of the business of policing cops entirely.
Add cuts to legal services, and what we get is a clear message from the people who elected Trump: Their response to all of these awful films of local police beating or strangling or shooting unarmed black people is to worry that there’s too much federal oversight of police, and too much advocacy for people who come in contact with police.
QueerAnarchism 