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Bill Lann Lee, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, insisted that the LAPD be put under a federal monitor who would dictate nearly every aspect of policing practice and policy for a minimum of five years. Lee presented the city with a massive consent decree that would bind the LAPD to the DOJ's supervision -- and if the city refused to sign, DOJ would take Los Angeles to court. Included in the proposed decree's 180 provisions were mandates to record the race of every suspect whom officers stopped, though the Rampart scandal had had nothing to do with so-called "racial profiling."In other words, rather than having police do their jobs -- busting criminals -- Holder insisted they spent untold thousands of man-hours filling out federal compliance paperwork to prove that L.A. cops weren't "profiling," even though the pretext for this intervention had nothing to do with "profiling."
In their September 2000 call to Deputy Attorney General Holder, Mayor Riordan and Chief Parks stressed that the city was already doing everything possible to prevent a reoccurrence of the abuses and that a federal monitor would only impede the department’s ability to operate and pursue existing reforms. Holder was unmoved. DOJ would either see Los Angeles in court or impose a consent decree on it, he wrote back. The federal juggernaut was unstoppable. In 2001, the LAPD signed the decree, starting a process of debilitating resource-drain and wholly useless bureaucratic paper-pushing. Holder had played a significant role in "negotiating" the decree, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Complying with the federal straitjacket cost the always cash-starved LAPD $40 million in its first year and $50 million each year thereafter, according to city estimates.
The nation's chief law-enforcement office hates cops -- and he's too much of a coward to admit it.
Maybe the DoJ could borrow a motivational speaker from the DoD to shake it up a bit...
ReplyDelete(link is SFW, but embedded video there is much less so)