By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--April 11, 2017
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Baltimore has seen a 22 percent increase in violent crime in just the last year. While arrests in the city fell 45 percent based on some of these ill-advised reforms, homicides rose 78 percent and shootings more than doubled. Just in 2017, we’ve seen homicides are up another 42 percent compared to this time last year. In short, the citizens of Baltimore are plagued by a rash of violent crime that shows no signs of letting up.
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The idea behind federal supervision of local police forces is that it will make them more accountable. Instead of a bunch of presumptively racist, violent hicks running things on a local level, we'll see the cool professionalism of the national government in charge. There are (at least) two problems with this approach. The first is that federal law enforcement, especially in recent years, hasn't exactly been a haven of cool professionalism. The second is that no law enforcement agency is very good at policing itself, meaning that a national police force is likely to be less accountable, not more.There is the FBI, with its jaw-droppingly awful director, James Comey, which has been heavily involved in the manufactured Trump-and-the-Russians scandal which was created for partisan purposes to kneecap the Trump transition team and the Trump administration. Despite its arsenal of monitoring technologies, the Secret Service has had difficulty preventing fence-jumping at the White House complex during both the Obama and the Trump presidencies. Reynolds recounted misbehavior by federal law enforcement, including Secret Service and Drug Enforcement Agency involvement with prostitutes in Colombia, some of which were paid for by drug lords. Federal agents have been accused of stealing Bitcoins during a criminal probe and the Department of Homeland Security couldn’t even keep a postal worker’s gyrocopter away from the U.S. Capitol despite plenty of advance notice. Reynolds adds:
They're not very good at keeping up with guns, either. An FBI agent's sniper rifle was stolen from his car days before an Obama visit, and — right under the eyes of Congress — Capitol Police keep leaving their guns in bathrooms — three times this year, including once in House Speaker John Boehner's private bathroom, where the gun was found by a visiting child. Then there's the Capitol Police's questionable shooting of Miriam Carey after she made a U-turn at a checkpoint in D.C.This is not an exhaustive list of federal law enforcement wrongdoing, either. Another problem with centralizing local policing power is that federal law enforcement agencies do a bad job policing themselves. “[U]nify all these police agencies under one umbrella and they'll do what guilty bureaucrats tend to do — hide the evidence, then investigate themselves and proclaim themselves blameless,” according to Reynolds. And centralizing itself encourages corruption by the party in power. Conversely, “[p]utting most law enforcement in the hands of diverse state and local authorities helps limit the potential for abuse. Putting everything under federal control, on the other hand, magnifies it.” Federal bureaucrats, Reynolds notes, “are all too willing to serve the interests of their political masters even when doing so violates the law.” Reynolds recommends ending civil service protections for U.S. government employees, banning public employee unions, and ending governmental immunity for federal, state, and local employees so they will have “to face civil lawsuits for illegal behavior, just as the rest of us must do.” But, paradoxically, the left-wing Democrat establishment in Charm City is behind the newly enforced consent decree. They may lose control over the local police, a bad thing, but they gain bigger, even more centralized government, which is always a good thing when you’re a left-winger. Having a federal monitor run the Baltimore police force is only a minor inconvenience for the city’s modern-day ward-heelers. As long as they can still rake in the gravy, they’re fine with it.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.