Attorney General Eric Holder is demanding cops ignore the fact that women commit far fewer crimes than men, and that Muslims are more likely than non-Muslim to launch jihad attacks in the United States.
The demands are part of the new effort by the administration’s Ivy League lawyers to impose a centralized veto over the professional judgement of experienced blue-collar cops and other federal officials who notice patterns of criminal behavior in a diverse society.
Governments must strike a balance between centralized control and decentralized expertise, said Roger Clegg, the CEO of the Center for Equal Opportunity. “Sometimes it makes sense to allow greater autonomy, sometimes not,” he told The Daily Caller.
Law enforcement officials can be lazy and unfairly stereotype some groups, he said. Also, “whenever you have a big bureaucracy… there needs to be some unity in approach [and] that has to be communicated to and followed by the cop on the beat,” he said.
Those “anti-profiling” rules are also being extended by President Barack Obama’s promotion of “disparate impact” policies in school discipline, mortgage regulations, jail penalties and hiring. Those policies demand that benefits and penalties be awarded proportionally to various ethnic and racial groups, regardless of cumulative behavior by members of those groups or the impact of the new policy on Americans.
“Having quotas for school suspensions is a bad idea, and having quotas for who gets stopped and searched or pulled over, or who is allowed to go on the airplane, is also bad,” Clegg said.
Holder’s Dec. 8 document includes several examples of professional judgement that the federal government wants to block.
“A law enforcement officer who is working as part of a federal task force has received a reliable tip that an individual intends to detonate a homemade bomb in a train station during rush hour, but the tip does not provide any more information,” said one example.
“The officer harbors stereotypical views about religion and therefore decides that investigators should focus on individuals of a particular faith,” the report says, without mentioning prior jihadi attacks on train stations in Madrid and London, or the lack of Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Shinto attacks on western railroads.
“Doing so would be impermissible because a law enforcement officer’s stereotypical beliefs never provide a reasonable basis to undertake a law enforcement or intelligence action,” says the report.
In the immediate aftermath of the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, FBI agents did not ask the local mosques for help in identifying two suspects spotted on surveillance cameras. Instead, the cops asked the public to identify the suspects. The terrorists fled and killed a policemen, Sean Collier, in their attempted escape.
The new guidelines direct federal police to ignore major differences between groups of people.
“Even if there were overall statistical evidence of differential rates of commission of certain offenses among individuals possessing particular characteristics, the affirmative use of such generalized notions by law enforcement officers in routine, spontaneous law enforcement activities is tantamount to stereotyping,” says the report. “It casts a pall of suspicion over every member of certain groups… and it offends the dignity of the individual improperly targeted,” it claims.
Holders’ deputies are already using their clout to push cops in districts around the nation to curb use of their professional judgement. But there’s evidence that the federal bullying is allowing the crime rate to rise.
But some group differences are too big for cops to ignore, or for Holder and other Ivy League lawyers to notice.
The report says cops must ignore sexual differences, even though a Nov. 11 Justice Department report says that “males were seven times more likely than females to commit murder” in 2008.
But the report also practices the “gender stereotyping” that it decries. It includes four examples of male criminality, and only two examples of where women are involved.
“The victim of an assault describes her assailant as an older male of a particular race with a birthmark on his face… Local law enforcement arrests an individual, and in the course of custodial interrogation the individual states that he was born in a foreign country,” said the first two examples.
“The school that the individual was supposed to attend notifies ICE that he failed to register or attend the school once in the United States, in violation of the terms of his visa…. a Park Police officer receives an ‘All Points Bulletin’ to be on the lookout for a fleeing bank robbery suspect, a man of a particular race and particular hair color in his 30s driving a blue automobile,” said the next two examples.
Women, on the other hand, are described as far less dangerous suspects in the only two examples about women.
Immigration “agents identify a group of women wearing t-shirts with the logo of a local bar who seem to be speaking an Eastern European language… agents also receive trustworthy information that the [drug] distribution ring has specifically chosen to hire older women of a particular race to act as the couriers,” said the two examples.
The report declares that when “making routine or spontaneous law enforcement decisions, such as ordinary traffic stops, federal law enforcement officers may not use race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity to any degree,” except when they’ve been given a specific description of a suspect, says the report.
The guideline sets tighter rules that exist in federal law, saying “this prohibition applies even where the use of a listed characteristic might otherwise be lawful.”
During investigations, “federal law enforcement officers may consider race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity only to the extent that there is trustworthy information… that links persons possessing a particular listed characteristic to an identified criminal incident, scheme, or organization [or] a threat,” said the document.
The directive also threatens cops with punishments if advocacy groups think the cops are noticing group differences.
“Law enforcement agencies therefore must administer training on this guidance to all agents on a regular basis, including at the beginning of each agent’s tenure… Each law enforcement agency therefore (i) will begin tracking complaints made based on the guidance, and (ii) will study the implementation of this guidance through targeted, data driven research projects… [and] all allegations of violations of this guidance will be treated just like other allegations of misconduct and referred to the appropriate department office that handles such allegations,” say the guidelines.
