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| Bad timing? Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert |
But there've been some pretty eye-opening examples lately.
For example, a lot of national media attention has been devoted to the questionable fatal shooting of 22-year-old Stephon Clark by two Sacramento police officers back on March 18th.
Far less national media attention has been focused on Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert receiving a $10,000 donation from the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association (CSLEA) for her re-election campaign just two days after Clark was shot eight times in the back while he was in the backyard of his grandmother's home - holding his cell phone.
As the top prosecutor in Sacramento, Schubert's office is responsible for determining if the shooting warrants the filing of criminal charges against the two SPD officers.
And as Darrell Smith reported for the Sacramento Bee on April 6th, she also received another $3,000 donation to her re-election campaign from the Sacramento County Alliance of Law Enforcement on March 23 - less than seven days after Stephon Clark was shot.
That's not to cast suspicion on all 7,000 members of the CSLEA, as their Website clearly shows, their thousands of members are committed to the safety of Californians in a wide variety of ways.
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| Teri Cox, communications dir. for the CA Statewide Law Enforcement Assoc. |
It raises legitimate questions about the ability of local prosecutors to fairly investigate police officers accused of serious misconduct resulting in the death or bodily injury of civilians.
In no way am I suggesting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions directly influenced two Sacramento police unions to make large campaign donations to a DA handing a police brutality case.
But the optics make it look sketchy.
Particularly given the reluctance of local prosecutors to file criminal charges against police officers even in cases of flagrant use of unnecessary deadly force against unarmed people who hadn't actually committed a crime.
Teri Cox, the director of communications and public affairs for the CSLEA tried to explain the timing of the $10,000 campaign donation as mere coincidence. As she told the Sacramento Bee:
"There was no timing involved. We've been for (Schubert) from the very beginning, it's unfortunate that the check had to happen at that time."
And maybe that's true, but it does call into question the objectivity of a DA who could arguably be seen as being in ethical and professional conflict by accepting large campaign donations from two police unions within days of two SPD officers shooting an innocent man in his own backyard.
Is that an example of authoritarianism?
The Oxford dictionary defines authoritarian as: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority.
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| The new American authoritarianism? |
By extension, that principle applies to local government in my humble view.
But what happens when you have an attorney general like Jeff Sessions?
A man whose personal cultural and racial bias places him on the fringe of the American mainstream.
Someone who clearly runs the Department of Justice as if the concept of justice is based not on the Constitution, but on an adherence to the narrow, hyper-conservative ideology favored by the erratic POTUS?
What happens when individual representatives of federal law enforcement branches begin to police people based not on criminal acts or violations of laws, but rather on what they think and write?
Like the Department of Homeland Security seeking bids for an outside contractor to compile a massive database of hundreds of thousands of "media influencers" (including journalists and bloggers) so the federal agency can supposedly monitor the content.
Is that for actual "homeland security"?
Or is it simply a means to try and validate Trump's loony paranoia about what he calls "fake news"?
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| Civil rights activist and journalist Shaun King |
As he wrote on his Twitter feed, ICE agents called him and his family out of line at JFK after they returned from a recent trip to Egypt.
He was questioned about his leadership role with the Black Lives Matter movement and asked about his activities in Egypt.
In recent years King has emerged as a leading voice on unjustified police brutality against people of color and the systematic racial bias of the American justice system.
He's covered everything from stories about racially-biased policing by the NYPD, to Bronx courts railroading young men of color into jails and he's become a leading social media presence advocating for justice and policing reforms.
If you've never read any of his stuff before, check out his recent story back in January in the Intercept about police officers in Cartersville, Georgia arresting 70 people ranging in age from 15 to 31, mostly African-Americans (including veterans, college students, and at least one pregnant woman) because they found less than an ounce of weed at a party.
(And yeah, Georgia cops really arrested 70 people and hauled them all to jail for a bag of weed - click the link above)
He's begun using his influence and reach on social media to encourage broader political activism, becoming a co-founder of a political action committee called Real Justice PAC to bring national attention (and money) to smaller local political races for offices like district attorneys that have massive influence over mass incarceration in an effort to address America's broken justice system.
Shaun King represents one of the emerging grassroots leaders in the fight against the flagrant authoritarianism trumpeted by the current presidential administration.
Small wonder he and his family were stopped in JFK airport and questioned by ICE, even though he's an American fighting for the values enshrined in the Constitution.
It's not always easy to discern the specific ways in which the decidedly-authoritarian approach to oversight of local American law enforcement under Trump's Attorney General Jeff Sessions is impacting the U.S. justice system on the community level.
But you can certainly smell the aroma these days.
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