Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced yesterday a new partnership between the federal government and a dozen U.S. Cities that aim to “combat spikes in violent crime,” but will, in fact, merely waste taxpayer money while accomplishing exactly nothing of use.
“The program features a three-year initiative to help coordinate crime-fighting efforts among federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement and prosecutors, Sessions said in unveiling the new National Public Safety Partnership,” Reuters reported yesterday. “’We have a duty to make sure our country does not abandon all the progress we have made against crime over the past few decades,’ Sessions said at a national meeting of law enforcement officials. His remarks were released by the Justice Department.”
Sessions, you’ll remember, is so out-of-touch with reality that he thinks stepping up the federal government’s war on marijuana is a good idea and expressed surprise at how unpopular his proposal to do so proved to be with pretty much everyone who isn’t a total moron. There is no reason to expect any “crime-fighting” approach he favors – or, is in charge of – will have any positive effect on anything.
“Sessions did not disclose any new funding for the initiative, which will focus on gun crime, drug trafficking and gang violence. The federal government will be providing help in areas that include training, crime analysis, gun violence, community engagement and investigations,” Reuters reported.
“Training?” “Crime analysis?” “Community engagement?” What the actual hell does any of this mean? Cops get training before becoming cops. “Crime analysis,” and “investigations” sound an awful lot like the same thing. And, “community engagement?” Really? Does Sessions really think anyone living in a “high crime” (read “black”) neighborhood really wants to have the police “engage” with their community any more than they already do? That typically just leads to unarmed members of their community getting shot dead for no apparent reason.
Government is government, however and won’t be deterred. So, this lucky dozen cities can expect to have the feds help the locals protect and serve the ever-loving shit out of them for the next three years: Birmingham, Alabama; Indianapolis; Memphis, Tennessee; Toledo, Ohio; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Buffalo, New York; Cincinnati; Houston; Jackson, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; Lansing, Michigan; and Springfield, Illinois, according to Reuters.
Of course in the real world, most of us know that the biggest problem with many of the “high-crime” neighborhoods in the aforementioned cities is the police themselves. In most of those communities, the relationship between the police and the people has been irreparably damaged by decades of the war on drugs, police violence that goes unpunished, and the for-profit policing the drug war’s asset forfeiture policies cause. No amount of “community engagement” is going to change the fact that those same cops are there to ruin someone’s life for possessing part of a plant, or for some other, similarly trivial reason.
The undeniable fact of reality is that the war-on-drugs is itself responsible for much of the violent crime in the USA. Black markets tend to settle business disputes with guns instead of lawsuits the way legit businesses do. When the USA foolishly prohibited alcohol in the 1920s, the ban immediately gave rise to organized crime syndicates. When Nixon launched the war on drugs 40-some years ago, he immediately began the rise of the very criminal elements that Sessions is now trying to fight the exact wrong way.
The only way to make a meaningful reduction to the amount of violent crime plaguing the inner cities is to end the war on drugs. This will immediately make selling drugs on the street a far less-profitable venture, and drug money is what fuels gangs and therefore gang violence.
Better still, ending the drug war would give cops no reason to venture into the neighborhoods where there are a lot of “drug and gang activity,” that they currently frequent. Reducing the number of incidents of contact between cops and the largely-minority residents of those neighborhoods will automatically reduce the number of innocent, unarmed black youths being murdered by cops who then walk away without criminal penalties of any sort. Reducing the number of times young blacks get murdered by cops will do a helluva lot more for police-community relations than any amount of “Community engagement” by cops can.
The federal government will not, however, ever end the war on drugs because the federal government’s only job is to protect the profits of the oligarchs who control it; among those of course being big-pharma and big-booze who have a government-protected duopoly on helping Americans legally catch a buzz. Furthermore, enforcing the bans on certain plants and plant-derived substances gives the government a lot of power and authority – things government needs and never gives up peacefully once acquired. To end the war on drugs would require the fallible, greedy, selfish and often very stupid people who make up the government to willingly make themselves less powerful. That simply won’t happen.
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