Donald Trump vigorously defended law enforcement during his presidential campaign. He pledged to restore order to the nation’s cities—where violent crime is surging—and to reinvigorate the rule of law. His appointment of conservative Republican senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general was a strong signal that Trump’s words were more than campaign rhetoric. Now that the Trump administration and the Sessions-led Justice Department are up and running, where should they focus their efforts?
The most immediate goal of the Trump administration should be to change the elite-driven narrative about the criminal-justice system. That narrative, which holds that policing is lethally racist, has dominated public discourse since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. In response, officers are backing off of proactive policing, and violent crime is rising fast: 2015 saw the largest one-year spike in homicides nationwide in nearly 50 years. That violent-crime increase has continued unabated through 2016 and into the early months of 2017. A Trump administration official—perhaps Attorney General Sessions, or the president himself—should publicly address the question of what we expect from police officers: Do we want them to be proactive and to try to stop crime before it happens? Or do we want them to be purely reactive, responding to crime only after someone has been victimized? The administration should explain that data-driven, proactive policing made possible the country’s 20-year, 50 percent violent-crime decline that began in the mid-1990s.
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2 comments:
You need to understand first in the first 100 days he has addressed a lot brought up in the election. Right now the main push needs to be on North Korea and Isis. More than any president we have had he has done more, his fight for health care was stalled because of the Democrats, the majority wanted Obama Care to end but others want to divide the country not work together. I am sure the police issue will be done but even they know it is a critical time. Pray and hang in there and each of us needs to do our part to support our President.
For many years, the MSM has convinced people that police target minorities just because they're black or Hispanic. Do people really think cops sit around at their shift change and say " We need to arrest x-numbers of blacks today" ? No. They arrest blacks because they happen to be committing a preponderance of the crimes!
I don't know about you, but when I fish, I go to where I think the fish are.
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