How Trump’s Hands-Off Approach to Policing Is Frustrating Some Chiefs

Deep admiration for the professional police who are standing up for something that works...in the face of Sessions, Trump and gang who seem determined to break it.

This entire article is laughable. These city leaders and police chiefs are literally begging their federal government to help them understand why they keep shooting unarmed citizens??? If you need a federal review to understand your own department, maybe you shouldn't be in leadership. Further, it sounds as if a DOJ review is viewed as a PR tool to ward off reform activists. NOT killing your constituents when approaching them isn't a Herculean task requiring lengthy investigations and extensive training. Save the crocodile tears and clean up your departments. I can see where this poor leadership could blame the federal government now for their failings. "We're so ashamed we killed those unarmed black people. Drat, why didn't the DOJ help stop us..??"

These reporters should have done their homework. The Spokane Police Chief Meidl forgot to mention how he saluted and supported the officer that was convicted in Spokane. The Chiefs wife who is also a police officer pushed a reporter covering the trial too. There are many articles (Spokesman Review & Inlander) about Meidl and his actions, but Mayor Condon looked the other way. Mayor Condon also seems to have a problem selecting Police Chiefs because he went through quite a few. Check out former Chief Frank Straub who resigned because of sexual harassment claims made by his female department spokesperson. Now Straub works for the Police foundation in WA DC, they must have looked the other way with the sexual harassment complaint. Why don't you reporters do a follow up story about the rest of this so everyone can see how much more there is that you weren't told. You would have been better off using a different example of respectable Police Chiefs or Mayors. embarrassing how sad

Sessions even alarmed his own party which is why he was passed over twice for Federal judgeships. Kelly is equally frightening , a military man with a real racist streak. A police state is not a risk of this pernicious law and order zealotry but the goal. Sessions and Kelly are spearheading the mobilization . Why? Trump will need the police to quell the civil unrest when he refuses to leave the White House upon impeachment. He will invoke a national emergency , and declare martial law. Dutarte, Erdogan , the Saudi Crown Prince and Putin are whispering in his ear.

seriously... when are we going to stand up and stop this rollback of anything Obama did just because Obama did it: healthcare police reform environmental protections ridiculous pipelines net neutrality etc . . .

Trump has no real interest in, or knowledge of, law enforcement. He is conning not only the Nation's police, but also the military, for his own ends. He wants to be seen for photo ops with those who do the REAL work so that his pathetic base will support him. He thrives upon being seen signing meaningless Executive proclamations, but would NEVER put his money where his mouth is. He WOULD put YOUR money in places where it doesn't belong, however. COPS AND SOLDIERS are not stupid, but they do have a hierarchy that inhibits self-expression and opinion. WITHOUT ACTIVE SUPPORT OF THE MILITARY and general law enforcement, Trump has no power. Obviously, the ability of his base to govern themselves is quite questionable (hi Alabama!). If the tribal cult followers don't start to realize that they are being horribly manipulated, and that they do not have any moral high ground at this point, they will be doomed to the worst disgrace in American history (at least as much as being defeated in a war for slavery!

The executive branch is riddled with holes, vacuums, voids. There are empty positions, and when an appointment is finally made, the person taking over is likely to be willfully ignorant or simply clueless. This is but one example.

America has over 18,000 police departments. You can guess that with this number the varying degrees of professionalism and competence. We have some which are really good and lots, due to underfunding, lack of good standards and training, which are at best mediocre. The obvious way to get better policing is to reduce the number of departments and upgrade the standards. A good number to start thinking might be 3142, which is the number of counties in the country, but that's probably too many. To get there, you would have to deal with the High Sheriff of "Milltown Township", or equivalent, which takes political capital. Laying over top of police departments are federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state enforcement agencies with police power. So, when something big happens, multiple departments and organizations send cops, all with their own chain of command and agendas, some of which compete with one another. Just pay attention to the next news cast on TV when a guy shoots up the local mall; you'll see many people standing behind the guy speaking, all of whom represent separate departments.

It’s the responsibility of these policy chiefs to have a broader perspective on law enforcement and the interaction of law enforcement officers and the community. If these professionals say Trump administration actions will be counterproductive, I tend to believe them. Trump has no interest in improving law enforcement outcomes. Indeed, the more crime, the more the appeal of his tough talk. His goal is always maintaining his base. Except perhaps for military personnel and veterans, no one holds higher status among Trump voters than police. And the idea that police are “handcuffed” by liberal politicians from taking dangerous blacks off the streets has been an article of faith for decades in the Trump demographic. Then there’s Trump’s approval among police rank and file, at least among white police, which I can only imagine is somewhere north of 90%. If Trump’s popularity in Staten Island can get even higher, his latest initiatives on this front will help.

As a former military captain, The Donald can claim to know more than police captains. For a historical description of the D-man's Senior moment at the NY Military Academy, read about his "promotion" when he was switched to No Company Captain from A-Company. It's juicy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decades-later-disagreement-over-... There was some hazing but Cap wasn't present 'cause he was in his room most of the time. His absent leadership caused internal struggles at A. His captain's job was to make sure footlockers were aligned. There was a Captain's position in an administrative basement of some kind, the kind of position involving no people. The guy already in that position was swapped with Captain Don.

My new name for the Justice Department is the INJustice Department, as long as the groper-in-chief and the perjurer-in-chief are running the show. Law and order, indeed!

If President Obama instituted a program that works, the idiot in our White House will destroy it. That man is a disgrace to our flag.

Even the cops think trump is really stupid.

"In August, Mr. Sessions announced that police departments could have broader access to surplus military equipment like grenade launchers used for tear gas and armored vehicles, which had stoked tensions with protesters after police shootings." Forget community policing - "to serve and to protect" - and treating American citizens of every hue with human dignity and respect. Arm the police for war with Americans - shoot first and ask questions never - while Donald Trump, a career tax-dodger, debt-dodger, draft-dodger, investigation-dodger and unindicted consumer fraud perpetrator helps himself and his family to $1 billion American dollars from the national treasury via the GOP Tax Scam Artist bill. Welcome Franz Kafka's fascist Trumpian America, where the poor get slaughtered by the police...and billionaires get a beautiful raise. You really have to be mentally challenged (or sociopathically greedy) to have voted for Donald Trump's perverted view of America.

Police departments can't be happy either with the GOP/Trump tax "reform" to abolish deductions for state and local taxes. The overriding purpose is to make higher tax communities clamor for lowering taxes thus diminishing needed support for local law enforcement.

Many police chiefs are frustrated about gun control. Too many guns means more challenges for them and the ability of people to carry guns openly, including at demonstrations, makes it difficult for police to keep the peace and determine who is dangerous when problems arise.

Weakening already weak bonds between law enforcement and communities is a recipe for race war sooner rather than later. Is that was Sessions and Trump really want to see - tanks in the streets of our cities?

Tour trying to make sense of a man (Trump) with no moral character. Trump is supposed to be a leader, a person to hold up for your children to see. He confuses everything he puts his 2 cents in and that's about what its worth. The Justice Department is headed by another sycophant of Trump with a less than stellar stellar reputation on justice and rights for all Americans. This does not let the police departments of the hook for not knowing constitutional rights. It's some more of blaming the other person. How about some responsibility shown from the highest level to the local level.

If the chief of police wants to implement changes in the department, why does he need the Federal government to hold his hand while doing so?

"In interviews, some of the chiefs said the new direction was out of step with a growing consensus that rebuilding community trust is essential to fighting crime,..." In other words don't bother to listen to the people doing the job. They don't know anything. Just come in and be as heavy handed as possible in order to rile everyone up in order to point at the ensuing mess and say that community anything doesn't work. It's better to have the community too frightened or angry with the police rather than willing to call or walk up to them to voice their concerns or make complaints. It's better that cops should be viewed as the enemy by everyone who isn't rich, white, or male. Of course this is another GOP dream: to give law enforcement the right to shoot first and ask questions later no matter who they shoot. When all this is added up this reader sees an administration and Justice Department and Congress that is pushing us towards a police state where no one is safe. We are going to see more massacres, more crime, and more civil unrest because of Sessions' and Trump's actions. Then again, we must have wanted this because we voted these clowns into office.

Why is it that in NYC, "the safest big city in America". where, by national standards, use of force is dramatically lower than in other locations, the NYPD has a Use of Force unit headed by senior officers? Certainly the NYPD doesn't know very much about policing, do they?

The president is putting the brass knuckles back on law enforcement officers given to abusing suspects, another wink and a nod to rogue cops to keep thugs in line. Instead of outreach by the authorities, the AG’s desire is to turn back the clock and allow the police do their jobs, even if that occasionally requires breaking a few skulls to get their message across.

A leading contender for Fake News of today. Most law-enforcement rank-and-file and departments are solidly pro-Trump. The real story is NYC's mayor De Blasio's handcuffing local cops and the utter disgust and ridicule they have for him.

If you want to see where American law enforcement is heading, look to the Philippines.

That's Trump for you, always pushing for fascism. It's necessary in a fascist state to have police who are not given oversight, who have free reign to be brutal. I'm sure a lot of the police don't like this, as plenty of cops are not actually fascist. But Trump wants fascism, and so fascism is what we're all going to get.

The Republican administration wants more citizen rights violated, more citizen outrage/complaints and more violence in the streets. Why? To distract from the wholesale looting ("tax relief") the GOP is engaged in and to further divide the population. The sole objective being to make their rich backers richer by draining the Treasury and exploding the debt.

Black lives don't matter as much in America as white lives, liars and lies. America has 25% of the world's prisoners with 5% of humanity. And while blacks are only 13.2% of Americans, 40% of the 2.3 million prisoners are black like Ben Carson. Prison is the carefully cleverly colored carved exception to the 13th Amendment's abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude. While the police war on black lives involves blue cops of all colors aka race against blacks. African American Sgt. La David Johnson died in Niger in an American military uniform in brave, honorable patriotic defense of his nation, it's people and their Constitution while his pregnant widow was slandered and disrespected by White House Chief of Staff John "Empty Barrel' Kelly and his boss Donald "Bone Spur" Trump. They just found more of his tortured and brutalized remains that they swore that they did not leave on the battlefield. While the Trump boys Don, Jr. and Eric Trump continue the family tradition of dodging and evading any service in the military uniform of any American armed force. And both boys are working for and with Vladimir Putin and the Russians and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks against American values and interests.

"At one point, the collaborative reform initiative was popular enough among chiefs that there was a months-long wait to join it; now, the Justice Department has told at least one city that it must file a public records request even to see the program’s research on its police department, internal records show." This rollback has all the hallmarks of a typical Trump administration reversal of Obama-era policies: applying ideological dictates to key programs, suppressing data by refusing to produce the data used to gauge program effectiveness, and in the case of this police program, reversing all the progress made in building community trust. Trump and Sessions always side with toughness to the point of displaying unconstitutional cruelty--everyone can remember Trump's address to police officers where this he essentially urged them to use as much force as they liked on arrested individuals. Take this policing situation and multiply it by every agency that deals with protections of the powerless against over-zealous authorities, and you see a wholesale return to many injustices in this country. Big corporations and authority figures are being given the freedom to ride roughshod over the rights of individuals, including those most powerless in our society.

The Trump administration has known and suspected criminals in its cabinet and Trump and his businesses have long been engaged in barely legal, at best, evasions of money laundering and zoning laws, often in association with or service of international criminals and flight capital. In Puerto Rico, the administration was involved in hiring, at extraordinary rates, a firm with no obvious qualifications -- close to text book corruption. Trump himself regularly funnels American taxpayer money to his own businesses by his regular travel to his own property, while allowing or encouraging foreigners and others seeking US assistance to stay in his hotels. Trump just endorsed Roy Moore for Senate, despite Moore's proud violation of the US Constitution that led to his removal from judicial office and powerful evidence that he sexually harassed girls over over an extended period of time. Trump has advocated torture and supported foreign dictators known to violate human rights. During the campaign he openly advocated physical assaults on his opponents. Now, the administration is overtly promoting the militarization of the police despite the clear evidence that doing so increases police violence and illegality with no associated reduction in non-police crime. How can the NYT headline writers and authors of this article describe the Trump administration as favoring a crack-down on crime or even a crack-down on violent crime? Quite the opposite.

I wonder if anyone in Congress has thought of this gem: get every sworn officer a body camera and, since they’re state/local, say it is a purely optional program and make their Federal funding dependent on use of the cameras. Should cut down on wild police and bureaucracy.