OFF THE WIRE
Yes, self awareness causes crime. It couldn't be that all of this
corruption and criminal activity was going on before cell phones. Cell
phones caused cops to commit crime. It is your fault. Put your damn
phones away so we can all be happy in bliss and ignorance. I am
starting to believe that this is the start of a massive awakening, where
free people have become aware that they are actually slaves to a highly
corrupt government. No wonder Matrix is still one of my favorite
movies. If it doesn't get filmed then it must have not happened.
MAC
Twice in recent days, FBI Director James B. Comey has stepped to a
podium here and asserted that police across the nation are reluctant to
aggressively enforce the law in the post-Ferguson era of smartphones and
YouTube.
And twice his comments have drawn disagreement and derision from a
host of sources, including civil rights activists, law enforcement
officials and, on Monday, the White House.
“The available evidence at this point does not support the notion
that law enforcement officers around the country are shying away from
fulfilling their responsibilities,” White House press secretary Josh
Earnest said Monday at a news briefing in Washington. “The evidence that
we’ve seen so far doesn’t support the contention that law enforcement
officials are somehow shirking their responsibility.”
Comey, nonetheless, stayed the course, telling thousands of police
officials gathered here for a conference of the International
Association of Chiefs of Police that a violent crime wave is gripping
the nation’s major cities. And he suggested that police officers
themselves are in part to blame, made gun shy by the prospect of getting
caught on the next video of alleged police brutality.
The “age of viral videos” has fundamentally altered U.S. policing,
Comey said Monday in a speech virtually identical to one he delivered
last week at the University of Chicago Law School.
His comments have been interpreted as giving credence to the notion
of a “Ferguson effect” — the theory that riots and racial unrest in
places such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, where police killed
civilians, has prompted police officers to become more restrained. That,
in turn, has theoretically resulted in an uptick in violent crime as
criminals become emboldened.
Comey acknowledged Monday that he has little evidence to support the theory.
“The question is, are these kinds of things changing police behavior
around the country? The honest answer is: I don’t know for sure whether
that’s the case,” he said, but he added that “I do have a strong sense”
it’s true.
It’s “the one theory that to my mind and to my common sense does explain” rising rates of urban violence in 2015.
Coming from the nation’s top law enforcement official, the remarks
have landed like a bombshell in criminal-justice circles, offending
people across the political spectrum. Civil rights groups and activists
have taken deep exception to the idea that crime rates might be linked
to protests against police brutality.
Amnesty International USA Executive Director Steven Hawkins called Comey’s comments “outrageous” and “unsubstantiated.”
Policing groups, meanwhile, have been equally infuriated by the
assertion that their officers have been somehow derelict in their
duties, frightened by teenagers with cellphone cameras.
“Time and time again [Comey] generalizes about a segment of the
population that he knows nothing about,” said James O. Pasco Jr.,
executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “He has
never been a police officer.”
Comey is “like the scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” Pasco said. “He
wanders around pretending to be smart and then at the end they give him
a diploma and he thinks he’s a genius. They swear him in as the
director of the FBI and all of a sudden he’s an expert on what police
officers are thinking.”The speeches also have put Comey at odds with the White House, as
President Obama is eager to take credit for lowering the crime rate.
As Comey was preparing to deliver his address Friday, Obama was
hosting a criminal-justice forum at the White House, where he celebrated
“incredible, historic reductions in crime over the last 20 years.”
“I know that there’s been some talk in the press about spikes that
are happening this year relative to last year. I’ve asked my team to
look very carefully at it — Attorney General [Loretta E.] Lynch has
pulled together a task force — and it does look like there are a handful
of cities where we’re seeing higher-than-normal spikes,” Obama said at
the time. However, he added, “across the 93 or 95 top cities, it’s very
hard to distinguish anything statistically meaningful.”
In his speech Monday, Comey also urged law enforcement leaders to
stop engaging in an us-vs.- them tug of war with protesters from Black
Lives Matter, the group that sprung up in the wake of the August 2014
shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson.
Instead, Comey said, police chiefs should use the budding protest
movement as a window into the minds of those they are charged with
protecting.
“There is a line of law enforcement and a line of communities we
serve, especially communities of color,” Comey said. “Each time somebody
interprets ‘hashtag Black Lives Matter’ as anti-law-enforcement, one
line moves away. And each time someone interprets ‘hashtag Police Lives
Matter’ as anti-black, the other line moves away.”
Comey’s comments come weeks after he held a session with 100 city
leaders and law enforcement officials from across the nation. At that
meeting, many — including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) — reported that
police morale was sinking in their towns amid ongoing scrutiny.
“We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having
a direct consequence,” Emanuel said during the meeting. “They have
pulled back from the ability to interdict. . . . They don’t want to be a
news story themselves. They don’t want their career ended early. And
it’s having an impact.”
Comey said such feedback has served as inspiration for his recent
speeches, in which he declared that violent-crime rates are being
inflated by “a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over
the last year.”
“That wind is surely changing behavior,” Comey said, later adding:
“We need to figure out what’s happening and deal with it now. I refuse
to wait. . . . These aren’t data points — these are lives.”
In his speech, Comey also contradicted what has been the
administration’s stance on the incarceration of thousands of men and
women in the 1980s and 1990s related to the national drug war.
“Each drug dealer, each mugger, each killer and each felon with a gun
had his own lawyer, his own case, his own time before judge and jury,
his own sentencing, and, in many cases, an appeal or other
post-sentencing review,” Comey said. “There were thousands and thousands
of those individual cases, but to speak of ‘mass incarceration,’ I
believe, is confusing, and it distorts an important reality.”
The Obama administration has worked to undo many of the policies that
are credited with spurring a period of “mass incarceration,” and has
boasted that 2014 was the first year in modern history that both the
crime rate and number of federal prisoners declined.
“I can’t speak to the range of Director Comey’s views on this topic,”
Earnest said when asked about Comey’s remarks on mass incarceration.
“The president certainly does believe that there are certain elements of
the criminal-justice system that are not serving the country in
communities all across the country very well.”