Martina White and Dom Costa are the sponsors of the bill

The Pennsylvania House approved a bill Tuesday that would prevent officials from identifying police officers while they are being investigated for firing their weapons or using force.

Lawmakers voted 162-38 for a proposal that also mandates release of the officer’s name if he or she is charged with a crime. If the investigation does not produce charges, the names can be released if doing so would not be expected to create a risk of harm to them or their families.

“This is not about protecting our police officers from bad publicity, it’s about protecting their lives and their family,” said the sponsor, Rep. Martina White, R-Philadelphia. “In today’s atmosphere and instant communication methods, we need to abundantly be cautious so as not to jeopardize our law enforcement.”

Opponents said the bill did not directly address a number of issues, including what would happen when someone violates the ban, and warned its secrecy could foster distrust between police and the people they serve.

“To mandate a veil of secrecy when an officer discharges a firearm or uses force? No, that would be a step in the wrong direction that would further damage the relationship between the general public and law enforcement,” said Rep. Russ Diamond, R-Lebanon. He also argued that withholding names would expose all officers on a force to public suspicion and that the bill would remove discretion currently enjoyed on a department-by-department basis.

Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Montgomery, said she failed in efforts to amend the bill to add a 60-day period after which the officers could be named.

She said the “risk of harm” wasn’t defined and wondered if it could apply to reputational or economic risks.

Rep. Dom Costa, D-Allegheny, said that within hours of his participation in a shootout as a Pittsburgh police officer, his life and family were threatened.

“We’re making way too much of this,” he said. “Does anyone in here have a bullet in the base of their brain? I do, from the line of duty.”

Police officers have “the power of life and death” and so should be subject to a high level of scrutiny, said Rep. Jordan Harris, D-Philadelphia.

The bill was sent to the state Senate for its consideration.

Keeping up the tradition of seasonal scares, theNew York Post(10/26/15) published a story about a potential “Halloween Revolt”: an attack by anarchists on police nationwide.

A group known as the National Liberation Militia, the Post reported, has been planning to dress up in masks like normal trick-or-treaters and use this disguise to sneak up on and assault cops in some coordinated fashion. The story was quickly picked up by CBS News, Fox News and NBC News, all of whom breathlessly alerted the public about this spooky-themed threat to police.

A couple points before dissecting the journalistic efficacy of disseminating these vague, half-assed threats. Firstly, it’s odd that the New York Post is and continues to be the sole source of this bulletin. The FBI typically posts major threats on its website, but this one, according to the FBI press officer FAIR contacted, was “meant for law enforcement and not to be disseminated.”

This “alert” originated from the FBI, but from the looks of it was handed off by the NYPD to the New York Post. Why? The subsequentFox News report hints at a motive:

The paper reported that the NYPD is monitoring the threat. The report of the threat comes at a time of unease between many police departments and the neighborhoods they patrol. The weekend before the threat was reported, Patrick Lynch, the head of the NYPD’s union, called for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films after the director took part in an anti-police rally in the city’s Greenwich Village neighborhood….

The rally was held days after New York City Police Officer Randolph Holder was shot dead while pursuing a bicycle thief in East Harlem.

This was soon followed by a TV segment on Fox News—that pinned the threat on an “offshoot of the Black Panthers”:

The FBI is saying a potentially dangerous anarchist group known as the National Liberation Militia; it was founded by former Black Panther members. Well, that group has proposed what it calls a “Halloween revolt”; it encouraged supporters to ambush police officers. That group is also asking members to wear Halloween masks and use bricks, bottles and firearms to attack our nation’s police officers.

There’s no mention of the Black Panthers in the New York Post piece–but they do come up in a piece of wild speculation offered by Republican congressmember and Fox News contributor Allen West after a short visit toGoogle:

A quick search online yields no information about a group called “National Liberation Militia,” although there is a known group called the “New Black Liberation Militia.” Is this politically correct, selective editing by the FBI?

FAIR reached out to the FBI for specifics on the threat, but via email it declined to do so.

Why was this “alert” subsequently carried by a dozen mainstream media outlets without anyone questioning the core substance? Even the claim of an “anarchist” group with “national” in its name is manifestly dubious–since anarchists, by definition, decry nationalism.

The fundamental problem with FBI terror warnings, as I’ve discussed before, is that there’s no downside. FBI terror warnings are polluted with moral hazard: Don’t warn and something happens, you’re in trouble. Warn, and nothing happens, no one cares. Warn and something happens—which it never does—and you’re a hero.

Especially in the context of increased scrutiny over police abuse, the incentives for the FBI to mindlessly issue warnings of lurking police killers are great–providing police with PR cover in the coming weeks and sowing the “war on cops” narrative in the hearts of scared, low-information viewers and tabloid consumers.

If fear is the currency of control, then this never-ending string of FBI warnings is a blank check that never needs to be cashed. Is there an “anarchist revolt” scheduled for Halloween? Unlikely. But millions of Americans now think there is, and ultimately that’s all that matters.

Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.

Messages to the New York Post can be sent to [email protected] (or viaTwitter: @NYPost). Remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

A police officer who fatally shot a man in a downtown Milwaukee park will receive duty disability pay.

Christopher Manney filed a claim saying the shooting and aftermath caused him to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The disability retirement pay usually amounts to about 75 percent of an officer’s salary – and it’s tax free. The Journal Sentinel reports Manney’s gross salary was about $71,000.

He shot 31-year-old Hamilton in April after responding to a call of a man sleeping in a downtown park. His family said Hamilton suffered from schizophrenia and had recently stopped taking his medication. Manney said Hamilton resisted when he tried to frisk him. The two exchanged punches before Hamilton got hold of Manney’s baton and hit him on the neck, the former officer has said.

Police Chief Edward Flynn fired Manney in October, saying the officer correctly identified Hamilton as mentally ill but ignored department policy and treated him as a criminal by frisking him. Manney appealed. Tensions had mounted ahead of Chisholm’s decision, fueled by anger over the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.

Milwaukee Country District Attorney John Chisholm said at a news conference that his job wasn’t to evaluate whether Manney adhered to policy but whether he applied the correct amount of force in that situation. He said witnesses reported Manney gave Hamilton verbal commands to stop.

The city’s Annuity and Pension Board approved the claim based on a review by a panel of doctors.

Prosecutors ruled the shooting justified, but Manney was fired for failing to follow department protocol in his approach to Dontre Hamilton at Red Arrow Park in April 2014. Manney said Hamilton grabbed his baton and attacked him with it, and the officer shot him.

The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration said today the so-called “Ferguson effect” may be real, becoming the second top federal law enforcement official in as many weeks to suggest growing police “trepidation” could be behind a recent spike of violence in some American cities.

DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg said he’s been told by police chiefs across the country that — with cops now under intense scrutiny and videos of their interactions often posted online — officers are concerned “rightly or wrongly that [they] become the next viral video.”

Speaking to a group of reporters today in Washington, Rosenberg was echoing comments made last week by FBI Director James Comey, who told a gathering of international police chiefs in Chicago that “some part of what’s going on is likely a chill wind that’s blown through law enforcement over the last year.”

The White House, particularly President Obama, has seemed reluctant to go that far. But today, Rosenberg repeatedly called Comey’s remarks “spot on.”

“I rely on the chiefs and the sheriffs who are saying that they have seen or heard behavioral changes among the men and women of their forces,” Rosenberg told reporters. “The manifestation of it may be a reluctance to engage” with suspected criminals.

Police and other law enforcement officials have increasingly been under the national microscope — and in some cases the targets of potential threats — ever since a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown last year. The controversial slaying prompted protests across the country.

In speaking of the “Ferguson effect” today, Rosenberg emphasized “a lot” of what he’s hearing “is anecdotal right now.” And, in further echoing Comey’s recent remarks, Rosenberg said there needs to be a national dialogue about what’s truly behind the spike in violence in some U.S. cities.

Rosenberg said gang-based competition in drug markets and the widespread availability of guns are also playing a part in it.

“There are some places where homicides are up and shootings are down. And then there are other places where both are up, and other places where both are down,” Rosenberg said. “We’re not entirely sure what’s going on, and we ought to talk about it and try to figure it out.”

Comey met with President Obama in the Oval Office on Thursday to discuss the matter. Rosenberg was a top aide to Comey at the FBI before joining DEA in May.

The Guarding writes:

Django Unchained star Jamie Foxx has encouraged his friend Quentin Tarantino to “keep telling the truth” about alleged police brutality in the US, despite a growing rightwing backlash.

Speaking at the Hollywood Film Awards on Sunday, Foxx said the Oscar-winning film-maker should “keep speaking the truth and don’t worry about none of the haters”. His backing came after The Wrap reported that Tarantino would soon write a comment piece explaining his reasons for attending a protest against alleged police brutality on 24 October, during which he made controversial remarks to a crowd of around 300 which have drawn anger and calls for a boycott of the director’s films from police unions.

Speaking at the rally in New York, which was organised by a group opposing what it described as a “genocidal assault on black and Latino people in this country”, the film-maker stated: “If you believe there’s murder going on then you need to rise up and stand up against it. I’m here to say I’m on the side of the murdered.”

Police unions in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, New Jersey, Chicago and Philadelphia have criticised the Pulp Fiction director for his appearance and choice of words one week after NYPD officer Randolph Holder was fatally shot in the city. On Friday, the National Association of Police Organisations joined the growing boycott.

“As a high profile figure, Tarantino’s language is utterly irresponsible, particularly at a time when the nation is seeing increasing and persistent calls for the killing of officers,” said the association in a statement. “Anti-police rhetoric like Tarantino’s threatens the safety of police and citizens alike. The police he is calling murderers are the same officers who were present along the protest route to ensure the safety of protesters, who provide security when he is filming and who put their lives on the line to protect our communities day in and day out.”

Tarantino has also come in for criticism from US conservative commentators such as Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who said in a broadcast that he suspected the film-maker had “destroyed his career” with the New York appearance.

Studio The Weinstein Company, which is releasing Tarantino’s new film The Hateful Eight on Christmas Day in the US, were unavailable to comment on fears of a boycott.

Cops pin down detained protesters in Manhattan and beat them.

by Stephen Lendman

Killer cops throughout America operate unaccountably – agents of wealth, power and privilege exclusively, rampaging against ordinary people ruthlessly, mostly victimized Blacks and Latinos.

Fatalities at their hands are on track to exceed 1,000 this year – more than double phony FBI reported numbers.

Official “justifiable homicides” are cold-blood murder in the vast majority of cases. Victims tell no tales, only witnesses when available.

Evidence is overwhelming. US streets are battlegrounds, Black and Latino youths prime targets, suffering disproportionately, victimized by racist injustice. State-sponsored criminality rages at home and abroad. Corpses piling up attest to America’s ruthlessness.

Not according to Obama. On Tuesday, he addressed the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) in Chicago – representing 16,000 members in 94 countries, saying:

“…I want to start by saying on behalf of the American people – thank you. This country is safer because of your efforts.”

“…I want to be as clear as I can be. I reject any narrative that seeks to divide police and communities that they serve. I reject a storyline that says when it comes to public safety there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them…’ “

“Because your work and your service really has helped make America safer than it’s been in decades, and that’s something for which every American should be proud.”

Hard facts disprove his litany of Big Lies. US police are oppressors, not public servants. They protect the rights of powerful monied interests at the expense of society’s most vulnerable.

They’re militarized from Pentagon-supplied weapons and equipment – more brutal than ever, waging daily war on persecuted communities.

Gitmo in Chicago is Exhibit A. A few miles west of where I live is ground zero for some of the most disturbing police practices – occurring in an off-the-books, unidentified, nondescript warehouse.

Lawlessly arrested and detained, mostly Black victims are isolated, denied access to lawyers for a day or more, and tortured during secret interrogations. Innocence in no defense.

The facility is a few miles from where Obama spoke, mindless of the horrors inside, committed by Chicago’s “finest.” Killer cops nationwide “make America safer,” he said.

“Each fallen police officer is one too many,” he blustered, ignoring their thousands of victims – non-people denied justice, casualties of US barbarism, killer cops operating solely as agents of power and privilege.

Obama promised them more federal aid and support, saying “in my federal budget proposal, I’ve asked Congress to increase funding for the COPS program (a Justice Department community policing initiative) so we can hire even more police officers and make sure you have the training and equipment you need.”

He failed to explain it’s to terrorize vulnerable communities more than ever, mostly Black and Latino ones. Instead he concluded, saying “good police work (reflects) America at its best…May God protect our cops.”

Who serves their victims? Why is nothing done about justice denied them? Who’ll hold police state ruthlessness accountable?

Governments oppressing their citizens are tyrannical. America mocks the principles it claims to support.

-###-

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III“.

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs

Douchebag supreme Matt Walsh drinking bourbon while attacking Marijuana users

by Virgil Vaduva

Matt Walsh, the hipster Christian blogger with a huge online following is hardly a guy that mimics Jesus. Basically an outright asshole, Walsh often pontificates on The Blaze, the site owned by Glenn Beck, against homosexuals, blacks and other minorities that do not live or act as he would have them. In a Rush Limbaugh style of rhetoric, he takes a machine-gun approach to anyone who disagrees with him, including people who attempt to hold cops accountable for their brutal actions.

Walsh often takes positions which are contradictory to his own way of living, such as openly advocating the use of hard liquor like bourbon or scotch while attacking Marijuana users and advocating for their imprisonment.

Worse yet, Walsh has attacked the recent victim in the case involving the South Carolina school cop attack. In an article published on The Blaze, Walsh blames the parents of the 16 year old black girl for the fact that she was beaten by the school cop.  Incredibly, Walsh claims that blind obedience to government authority figures should not only be expected, but enforced trough the use of violence:

You don’t want black girls to be dragged out of classrooms in public schools? Good, neither do I. Nobody wants to see that. But, leftist race mongers, that means you have to stop ignoring the fact that these incidents don’t happen out of nowhere. That cop didn’t just barge into the room and randomly pull the nearest black student out of her chair. He was asked to respond after the student couldn’t be bothered to obey a rule or listen to her teacher or listen to an administrator.

What? Obeying rules is certainly not a top priority in life for a teenage girl; not only that, but blindly obeying rules given to them by a government employee should never even be on the table. In essence Walsh would have children who are forced to sit in a prison-like environment for hours each day be assaulted, slammed on the ground and thrown in a cage simply for disobeying a State official.

The cop who assaulted the girl was even nicknamed “Officer Slam” by the students due to the well-known abuse they often suffered at his hands. But why blame the cop since he is an “authority figure” and can do no wrong when you can blame the girls’ parents?

Calling the girl an “extreme troublemaker” Walsh rants:

The answer is going to be partly their own choice, their own free will, and partly an utter dereliction of duty by the parents (or probably parent, singular). If Black Lives Matter, and they surely do, we would be having this conversation. We would stop blaming the cops for everything all the time and start passing some of the blame over to the people who show no concern for the rules or the law.

The problem is that after Walsh wrote his hit-piece against the teenage girl, it was revealed that she is an orphan and she is in essence in foster care. Oops. Now there is nobody left to blame, except for the violent cop, but no worries. Walsh has a fallback plan.

This is a guy who openly and sanctimoniously advocates obeying state laws. The same gay-marriage laws and abortion laws which he opposes and disobeys are wrong…but obeying police officers’ every word should be something enforced through beatings and violence.

I believe it’s safe to assume that Matt Walsh would have been the first guy to line up to enforce and obey the laws which required Americans to turn in runaway slaves? Most likely. It is people like Walsh who have created and shaped a nation where the State is being worshiped, Government is respected and cops can do no wrong. Why? Because in Walsh’s warped mind God tells him to do so.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

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.”

Some left-wingers sometimes mock some right-wingers for likening every government program to socialism.

Not Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the leading Democratic presidential candidate not named Clinton. He embraces the idea that socialism is just a word for government, which is just a word for the things we do together.

It’s the strategy he plans on using to sell his vague idea of “democratic socialism” to American voters. Up to now, Sanders’ explanations have largely involved pointing to Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark, which are far more socialist in the minds of American left-wingers than they are in the real world.

But as Sanders comes tantalizingly close to being within the margin of error of Hillary Clinton in the polls, he’s decided he needs to push democratic socialism like he means it. Sanders’ plan is to explain that socialism consists of things like public libraries, fire departments, and police departments.

The New York Times reports:

“When you go to your public library, when you call your Fire Department or the Police Department, what do you think you’re calling?” Mr. Sanders said. “These are socialist institutions.”

While Mr. Sanders may have a point, he drew some blank stares from liberals in the audience who are probably used to hearing the police described with other terms. He didn’t dwell on the point, veering back to his concern about social safety nets.

Instead of wallowing in their own ignorance, liberals should face the fact that police departments are, if not exactly socialist institutions, certainly institutions that, in a democratic society like America’s, are more or less representations and embodiments of the popular will. The implications of that are not just theoretical. Cops engage in police brutality in large part because “we” want them to. The cops who killed Eric Garner, for example, did so because they were ordered by their superiors to crack down on loose cigarette sellers, who threaten not corporate profits (a loose cigarette has already been purchased, at some point, from the tobacco company) but government revenue (a loose cigarette evades local taxation). Those superiors, in turn, ordered cops to crack down on loose cigarette sellers because that’s what New York’s democratic government wanted.

After Garner was killed and several other local incidents of non-fatal police brutality over petty law enforcement issues got a lot of press, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) insisted he would continue to order police to vigorously enforce such laws. “A violation of the law is a violation of the law,” the mayor said, illustrating why law enforcement, when met with resistance, can become deadly.

Bill Bratton, the police commissioner, made the same point Sanders did, that his liberal supporters are so uncomfortable with, that the police are a democratic institution. “It’s important that when an officer does approach you to correct your behavior, that you respect them,” said Bratton. “That’s what democracy is all about.”

It is. And while it may be fashionable today to blame the policies that lead to excessive police brutality on things like white supremacy, it would be far more productive, and lead to real harm reduction, to engage police brutality as a true expression of democracy, and to correct our expectations of government.

Sanders’ tactic, however, shouldn’t be surprising. He learned to be an ally of cops, to treat them as part of the “labor” class not, say, an apparatus of the ruling class, decades ago. When Sanders is asked about criminal justice and moves to economic issues, it’s not just that he’s a one-note pony but that he understands the importance of police unions in creating “good jobs,” even if they come at the expense of systematically trampling on the rights of Americans, with a particular focus on the poor and marginalized.

By Ed Krayewski for Reason.com

Last week,  Rahm Emanuel joined other big city mayors and police chiefs in Washington, D.C., to discuss the violence plaguing their cities. One of the conclusions they drew is that the increase in violence is partly due to the decrease in policing.

During the discussion in D.C., the many of the leaders, including Emanuel, agreed that part of the problem is the “YouTube effect,” meaning officers are less aggressive now than they were before due to the fear of becoming the star of the next viral video about police abuse.

Emanuel used the word “fetal” to describe these officers.

“We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a direct consequence,” Emanuel told U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the meeting, according to the Washington Post. “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.”

On Monday, Emanuel defended that comment to the Chicago Tribune, saying the events that happened in Ferguson and Baltimore led many officers to back down when they might not have before.

“What happened post-Baltimore, what happened post-Ferguson is having an impact,” Emanuel said. “And I still believe recent events over the last year or 18 months have had an impact. And officers will tell you that. And I tried to speak up for the good officers that are doing community policing that make up the men and women of the Chicago Police Department.”

At last week’s meeting, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton backed up that thought, saying the perception of police in New York would have been even worse if two of their officers were not killed execution-style in December.

The summit was held following a particularly violent September in Chicago. For two consecutive weeks, more than 50 people were shot. Just a few weeks later, the Daily Beast named Chicago “America’s mass-shooting capital.”