The group that designed the Department of Justice program to train cops how to build trust with transgender people so they can more easily report hate crimes is funded by progressive billionaire George Soros, records reveal.
The program was launched this week by the DOJ unit sent to Sanford, Fla. to oversee anti-George Zimmerman protests.
Soros’ Open Society Foundations was a top Visionary Circle donor to the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), according to the advocacy group’s most recently available 2012 annual report.
NCTE Policy Director Harper Jean Tobin helped design and model the program launched Thursday by DOJ’s controversial Community Relations Service (CRS).
The program aims to help police identify hate crimes and make it easier for transgender people to overcome their negative “perceptions of law enforcement” in order to report hate crimes.
“It’s clear that such a training is as necessary as it is overdue,” said Associate Attorney General Tony West. “Because too often, in too many places, we know that transgender victims are discouraged from reporting hate crimes and hate violence due to their past negative interactions with and perceptions of law enforcement.”
The Daily Caller reported that DOJ’s Community Relations Service spent taxpayer money to provide security for and facilitate anti-George Zimmerman protests in Florida during the controversy over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, including a rally headlined by activist Al Sharpton.
CRS was established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. According to the CRS web page, “The Community Relations Service is the Department’s ‘peacemaker’ for community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race, color, and national origin.”
“At CRS headquarters, we (meaning I) regularly had to warn or take corrective action against career employees for acting as advocates instead of mediators,” former CRS director Ondray Harris told TheDC. “Some CRS employees come to the Agency with anti-law enforcement or anti- what they would call the ‘white establishment’ (attitudes).”
“I found that some employees of CRS talked neutrally in public and spoke in the tenor of mediators in public, but behind the scenes, when they talked to the civil rights groups or the perceived aggrieved parties, they’ll say, essentially, ‘Don’t worry. The Department of Justice is here, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,'” Harris said.
“It is clear that some of the agency’s employees feel more of an allegiance to the people they perceive to be discriminated against than to the law, the government, or even the CRS mandate,” Harris said. “In some cases, this is the U.S. government taking a stand against some people.”