by Anne Gearan (Washington Post)

Tough-on-crime policies that emphasized arrests and convictions for relatively minor offenses have failed the country, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday, leading to overcrowded prisons and too many black men “missing” from their families and communities.

“We need to restore balance to our criminal justice system,” Clinton told an audience at Columbia University in New York.

Calling for an “end to the era of mass incarceration,” Clinton endorsed body cameras for police nationwide to record interactions between officers and potential suspects. Making her most specific policy proposals since launching her campaign earlier this month, Clinton said it’s time for a nationwide overhaul of what she called misguided and failed policing and prison strategies.

In effect, she was saying that policies put in place when her husband Bill Clinton was president have not worked. Clinton did not mention her husband or identify exactly which laws and sentencing policies she thought had gone wrong. But many of those policies grew out of the crackdown on drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses that took place before and during Bill Clinton’s presidency 20 years ago.

Later in the day, a Clinton campaign spokesman tamped down on the notion that she was refuting her husband’s policies:

In her address, Clinton said there is an emerging bipartisan consensus that the current system isn’t working. Much of the speech dealt with the deaths of black men after interactions with police, and the protests that turned violent in Baltimore this week.

She listed some of those men, including Freddie Gray, whose death in police custody set off the Baltimore rioting.

“Not only as a mother and grandmother, but as a citizen, as a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families,” Clinton said. “We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

She reeled off statistics about what she called the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates for black men and what she called the broader economic and educational inequality of poor and minority communities.

“We need smart strategies to fight crime that help restore trust between law enforcement and our communities, especially communities of color,” she added.

What Came Before Baltimore’s Riots.

Amazing Democrats’ Editor’s note: We have heard from President Obama and likely presidential contender Martin O’Malley on what is happening in Baltimore but Hillary Clinton’s silence on this very serious issue which is on the forefront of most Americans is doing her damage and she needs to make a statement about this important issue sooner rather than later. We do not want another “controlled” Hillary Clinton presidential campaign like we had from her in 2008. Hillary it is time to speak up on this issue as your silence is deafening and this is something you or your advisers can’t ignore for very much longer.

Likely Presidential contender Martin O’Malley Speaks Up about what is happening in Baltimore (New York Times):

Likely presidential contender Martin O’Malley cut short his speaking tour in Ireland to head back to his hometown of Baltimore and was on the riot-scarred streets on Tuesday night.

O’Malley served from 1999 to 2007 as Mayor of Baltimore and followed that with eight years as Maryland’s governor. Now he is sizing up a White House bid.

“There’s a lot of pain in our city right now and a lot of people feeling very sad,” he told the New York Times.

“And look, we’ve got to come through this together,” he said. “We’re a people who have seen worse days, and we’ll come through this day.”

O’Malley asked local activists whether it was safe to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in the city where some of the worst rioting occurred.

The former mayor was greeted with both jeers and cheers from the locals when he stepped out of his car.

“Did you see all those boarded-up houses on your way out?” shouted a man who greeted him in front of the Arch Social Club.

“I actually did,” Mr. O’Malley said.

“You plan on doing anything about that?”

“I got elevated to the same rank as you, I’m a citizen now,” O’Malley said.

“You made a lot of promises,” the man shouted.

“And I did the best that I could,” the former mayor said.

“In what community? Not in the black community!”

O’Malley pointed out he had buried ten police officers during his time in Baltimore. “I buried 10 police officers too, half of them were black and half of them were white.”

Ernest Taylor, thanked Mr. O’Malley for getting him off drugs through a prison program. “Ah, good man,” O’Malley said. “Say that again. Give me a big hug.”

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by THE EDITORIAL BOARD (The New York Times)

The riots that devastated urban America during the 1960s were often ignited by acts of police brutality that inflamed poor African-American communities where the police were seen not as protectors but as an occupying force. These same tensions resurfaced last year in the suburban St. Louis community of Ferguson, Mo., where riots broke out after a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager. They have now erupted on a larger stage, in Baltimore, after the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who suffered a catastrophic injury while in police custody.

President Obama has condemned as inexcusable the looting and arson that spread across the face of the city after of Mr. Gray’s funeral. But he also implied that the Baltimore Police Department had “to do some soul-searching.” Indeed it does: A well-documented history of extreme brutality and misconduct set the stage for just this kind of unrest.

Proof can be found in a meticulously reported investigation by The Baltimore Sun of lawsuits and settlements that had been generated by police-brutality claims. “Over the past four years,” the investigation noted, “more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations.” The victims included a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant woman who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.

The report, published last fall, detailed what it called “a frightful human toll” inflicted by the police: broken bones, head trauma, organ failure, and even death, occurring during questionable arrests. It found that judges and prosecutors routinely dismissed charges against the victims and that city policies helped to hide the extent of the human damage. Settlements prohibited the victims from making public statements. The Sun estimated that the cash-strapped city had spent $5.7 million on settlements and $5.8 million on legal fees since January 2011.

Baltimore residents were familiar with these and other stories of police abuse when Mr. Gray’s case fell into the public spotlight earlier this month. The police chased and apprehended him on April 12, allegedly because he had “made eye contact” with a lieutenant and then ran away. Cellphone videos of his arrest showed him being dragged into a police van, appearing limp and screaming in pain. The police have acknowledged that they delayed in calling for medical help. When he arrived at the police station, medics rushed him to the hospital, where he slipped into a coma and died a week later.

His family has said that 80 percent of his spinal cord was severed and that his larynx had been crushed. This account is at odds with a police report claiming that “the defendant was arrested without force or incident.”

The Baltimore Police Department has a particularly egregious history and has entered into a voluntary reform agreement with the Justice Department. But there is no reason to believe that it is unique in terms of its toxic relations with the people it is meant to protect.

Indeed, over the last five years, the Justice Department has opened 21 investigations into local police departments around the country and is enforcing reform agreements with 15 departments, some investigated by previous administrations.

Mr. Obama was right on the mark when he observed on Tuesday that tensions with law enforcement had simmered in African-American communities for decades and now seemed to be bursting into view once a week.

“This has been a slow-rolling crisis,” he said. “This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”

He also said that addressing the problem would require not only new police tactics but new policies aimed at helping communities where jobs have disappeared, improving education and helping ex-offenders find jobs. The big mistake, he said, is that we tend to focus on these communities only when buildings are burning down.

 

 

by Veronica Rocha (LA Times)

A model has filed a suit in which she claims Bay Area police officers slammed her to the ground and broke four bones in her face. Footage from police security and body cameras recorded at least part of the incident.

Megan Sheehan of San Francisco filed a federal lawsuit against the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department, saying officers used excessive force when they detained her during a drunken night on St. Patrick’s Day in 2014.

In U.S. District Court documents, Sheehan says she plans to amend her lawsuit to include the city of Oakland, as well as an Oakland police officer she claims held her hand back during the fall.

The officers’ actions were “willful, wanton, reckless, malicious, oppressive and/or done with a conscious or reckless disregard” for Sheehan’s rights, according to the lawsuit.

Body camera video footage obtained by KGO-TV on Saturday shows officers grabbing Sheehan’s arms and appearing to push her to the ground while the model was being booked in Santa Rita jail. In the background, someone says “Ooh,” after she was thrown to the ground. Another voice  says, “You might want medical.”

Photographs taken at the hospital show Sheehan’s bloodied, bruised and swollen face.

BART spokesman James K. Allison said he couldn’t comment on the case because of the ongoing litigation.

Sheehan rode the BART train to the Lake Merritt substation in Oakland, where she was arrested on suspicion of battery on an officer and resisting arrest, according to the lawsuit.

Once she arrived at the Santa Rita jail, she claims four assailants beat her unconscious. As a result of the beating, four bones on her face were broken. Her front tooth was cracked and her molar was split.

Sheehan was taken to a hospital, where she spent two days receiving treatment.

She was returned to the jail and later released on bail. She says criminal charges were never filed against her.

Sheehan believes officers used excessive and unreasonable force against her and violated her rights.

“Municipal defendants BART and County of Alameda were responsible for ensuring the health and safety of the individuals placed in their custody.” the lawsuit stated. “This included but was not limited to protecting those in custody from excessive or punitive uses of force.”

by Sandy Banks (Los Angeles Times)

A spate of videos has brought what looks like police brutality into our living rooms.

Logic says these incidents are aberrations; that’s what makes them news. But I’m having trouble clearing my mind of those ugly scenes — and I know I’m not alone.

Are these just individual cops gone rogue? Or are they the tip of a giant iceberg of on-duty misconduct?

That’s become the subject of private small talk and public dialogue, as we grow uncomfortably accustomed to the sight of law enforcement officers meting out street justice.

This week brought criminal charges against a Los Angeles Police Department officer

caught last fall on camera stomping and kicking a man being held down by other officers on a South Los Angeles street. The video from a store’s surveillance camera hasn’t been publicly released, but when the police chief pronounces it disturbing, you can imagine how bad it must be.

We did see the beating of Francis Pusok in San Bernardino County, shot by a television news helicopter this month. It shows sheriff’s deputies kicking and punching Pusok, who is on the ground with his hands behind his back.

And the cellphone video of a homeless man being shot to death during a tussle with LAPD officers on skid row.

And the pummeling of a mentally ill woman by a California Highway Patrol officer who’d been summoned to keep her from walking onto a busy freeway. A passing motorist captured and shared the stomach-turning scene.

Just last Sunday, a federal marshal was caught on video smashing a woman’s cellphone on the ground as she recorded officers detaining several people in her South Gate neighborhood.

For me, the most painful of the flurry of police videos recorded an encounter in South Carolina, where an officer shot a man eight times in the back as he fled during a traffic stop. Then the cop placed what appeared to be his stun gun next to the dying man, and claimed that the shooting had occurred during a scuffle over the weapon.

The officer’s story would have been hard to refute had a passerby not captured the encounter on his cellphone. After the video surfaced, the officer was charged with murder.

That’s hardly mollifying. I’ll recall that video and that lie whenever I hear an officer explain a shooting with: “He was reaching for my gun.”

I spend a lot of time lecturing readers who email to complain about something horrible that “the blacks” have done: It’s wrong to judge an entire group by the actions of some. I’m not to blame for the black guy who burglarized your house or the black woman who was rude to you at Walmart.

Yet, even though I’ve felt the sting of stereotyping, I feel like I’m in the grip now of an insidious bias — battling a new and reflexive distrust of law enforcement.

I know that’s unfair, yet every video peek behind the curtain seems to reinforce it.

It’s not just the officers who administer the beatings or fire the guns that poison my perception. The ones who watch, but don’t intervene, do just as much damage to our collective impression. They suggest that what we’re seeing is business as usual.

Take the case of Omar Abrego, who died last summer after struggling with a pair of officers trying to arrest him. A cellphone video captured Abrego’s suffering, but doesn’t make clear whether officers went too far.

What it does show is more than a dozen patrol cars descending on the street, adding nothing but chaos to an already tense encounter. “I think we have enough, fellas,” one officer said as a half-dozen cops crouched around Abrego and others milled about.

Two dozen officers to arrest a guy for reckless driving. It’s a scene out of sync with what we consider community policing, but it’s the reality in some neighborhoods.

“For some people these videos provide a sort of relief,” said Sandra Hernandez of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “It gives a certain validation to what they know is true. For years, they have been saying this goes on, and no would believe it.”

Technology is reshaping our perception of policing and the criminal justice system it serves. Both, it seems, are more fallible than we’d like to believe.

The omnipresence of cameras is making it harder for officers to avoid accountability. Advances in DNA matching have freed more than 300 people around the country convicted for crimes they didn’t commit.

The revelations are forcing us to acknowledge that justice can be ambushed — by manufactured evidence, coercive interrogations, errors by eyewitnesses and even outright lies by those we’ve armed with badges and guns.

So where do we go from here?

Beyond a focus on individual officers and high-profile offenses, and toward a deeper evaluation of how and why things go wrong.

“We give police officers rights that we don’t give any other government officials,” ACLU attorney Peter Bibring pointed out. “They have the power to take a life based on their split-second judgment. So it’s crucial for us to understand how police are using their powers. And the video provides that understanding in a way almost nothing else does.”

That’s what makes these videos important — not just that they catch officers red-handed when they are doing wrong, but that they force us to talk about what we expect and what we won’t tolerate from law enforcement.

And that’s a conversation that has to do more than fixate on blame or founder on stereotypes.

 

by The New York Times Editorial Board

The 2016 presidential campaign has barely begun, but it is already clear this will be the super contest of the “super PACs” — the fast evolving political money machines that are irresistible to candidates because they can legally raise unlimited money from donors seeking favor and influence.

The idea of a super PAC created to support an individual candidate was little more than an experiment four years ago when strategists for Mitt Romney tested its potential after misguided court decisions shattered federal limits on spending on elections. President Obama, after initially denouncing unlimited contributions, used a super PAC in his re-election.

Money poured in, and this year all the major candidates, Republican and Democratic, will be counting on supposedly “independent” super PACs. They will be able to benefit from funds far greater than the amounts allowed under current regulations, which limit contributions to a candidate’s formal campaign organization to $2,700 per donor in the primary contests and $2,700 in the general election.

Super PACs are supposedly independent of the candidate’s campaign, but that distinction has just about vanished. In fact, strategists for the campaign of Jeb Bush are reportedly considering turning over some of the campaign’s central functions to their “independent” Right to Rise super PAC, making it the super-lucrative tail that wags the dog.

The difference in fund-raising power between the two political entities runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. The Bush campaign’s potential move could mean having the super PAC take over not just television advertising and direct mail, but a host of other campaign duties, according to The Associated Press. This would essentially amount to making the super PAC the true campaign center, without money limits that would apply to traditional campaigns.

Federal law prohibits coordination between the candidates’ organizations and the super PACs. That ban is fast becoming a fiction, with federal election regulators uninterested and unable to enforce the law. The result is that some of the candidates’ closest political advisers and managers are now going off to take charge of super PACs, where they manage the unlimited money pouring in for their candidates.

For example, Mike Murphy, Mr. Bush’s longtime political adviser, is reportedly expected to manage the Bush super PAC. Experienced operatives could skirt the non-coordination rule and do what a candidate needs without explicitly working with the campaign organization. Other super PACs likewise have already installed campaign loyalists at their helms while proclaiming non-coordination.

A legal challenge to this way of doing business, being prepared by two political watchdog groups, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, cites a law that bars a candidate or his proxies from effectively controlling an independent entity like a super PAC.

Unfortunately, no one in politics expects the dysfunctional Federal Election Commission to follow through on the complaint. The Justice Department has said it might look deeper into campaign abuses, but Mr. Bush and the other candidates insist they strictly adhere to the regulatory process, such as it is.

Not so incidentally, Mr. Bush has been freely raising money for his super PAC since he is not yet a formally declared candidate, so coordination isn’t even an issue.

Daily now with cellphones we see the conduct of our Police and serious questions have to be addressed as not only is this reported in America, the world media is daily reporting on the inhumane way our sworn Police Officers are behaving themselves when on duty and sometimes when they not aware they are being filmed. Yes, more training will help, new laws of conduct will also help and as for our Civil Rights Division at the Department at Justice to actually do their job, I won’t hold my breath on that ever happening but the mindset within our Police Force and their supervisors have to change and change radically. This non spoken rule of never turning in your brother or sister on the force no matter what serious criminal acts they commit against our citizens when on duty has to change or those immature and illegal secret societies they stupidly join in the insane thought it will enhance their careers, really? How brain dead is that line of thinking?

The Police should be very concerned as the world’s media is reporting on their criminal behavior daily and I even have people aboard asking me will they be attacked by our Police if they are pulled over if they visit America? Should this not be a wake-up call America?

The Amazing Democrats while loyal to the Democratic Party will speak up against any of our candidates if they fail to be there for the people and not for profit. Hitting the 250,000 viewers on our social media this week we might be a small force in relation to the US national media outlets but never the less we have a voice. We have always being consistent about President Obama’s abysmal record on Civil Rights and when he leaves the Presidency in January 2017 history will record what we have being saying all long. It is insulting when The White House sends out a general email blast about the President egg hunting Easter Sunday when some poor US Citizen has being gunned down unarmed by our Police. Really White House Communications

Department is the best you can do for your large salaries? Its call sticking your head in the sand and praying this issue will go away. Well time to grow up White House, it isn’t going away and not for a long time until we all see huge changes and it must come from the top. Can we at least hear your thoughts on this issue Mr. President which we should be hearing weekly?

What both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush need to learn and learn fast as they have failed on their first test to speak up on this issue and we a long way off to  go to November 2016, is that

controlled comments by your press advisors is turning off the young voters. Just talk with them and they point out they don’t want to vote Republican or Democrat in 2016, they are sick of the same old BS. All we read about is the candidates obsession with rising campaign finance which unlike 2012’s Presidential election I predict will be the downfall of 2016’s our Presidential election because basically we are all tired of it and want a candidate who’s voice and thoughts aren’t controlled by their media advisors and money people. We deserve better in America as we see with the current British election and the Prime Minister’s bad advice of having his every word controlled by his advisors. Political candidates are going to learn the hard, if you don’t express your own voice and thoughts and not those vetted by your advisors you are doomed to lose.

 Let’s hope Hillary learned something from her failed Presidential bid from 2008 but from what we have seeing to date with her very controlled appearances I doubt it.

We are all waiting for that candidate who isn’t afraid to speak up about the issues that affect us like what is currently happening to our Nation’s Police force and the way Officer’s are committing criminal acts on duty caught on camera and getting away with it. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear a candidate talk about the need for campaign reform and how ugly the word “Super PACs” are? A colleague invited me to lunch to advise a candidate running for a Congressional seat in Los Angeles (I am not surprised he didn’t win) and I was stunned at the amount of advisors in suits who followed him in the door. Every time he opened his mouth when I asked him a question, an advisor answered for him. Bad sign I thought and it only got worse. He was obsessed with Super PACs and I asked him had he bother to research any of  I asked him had he bother to research any of The Amazing Democrats’ social media outlets and he said no after I spent four hours researching him. End of lunch for me and this meeting and I was not surprised we were left the large bill to pay for him and his advisors. They had graced us with their presence and he was running as a Democrat? I dread to think what lunch would of being like with a Republican candidate. What I did learn from this lunch is that they really think us voters are stupid and that tells me their heads are so far up their asses that losing is the best thing that could happen to them and our country. I do hope I am wrong about Hillary but time will tell but she failed one thousand percent on her first test with our Police committing so many criminal acts daily on our citizens all over the US and not speaking her mind on it. Super PACs can buy the Presidency but they can’t buy our vote.

Let’s hope this isn’t a trend for Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush as it is too late to change their mindset on how immorally wrong the Super PACs are for our country and what should be it’s fair and balanced election system. Watch this space and hopefully I will be proven wrong but I doubt it.

© Editor of The Amazing Democrats.                            

by Erik Wemple (The Washington Post)

Fox News chief Roger Ailes is a quote factory, a golden interviewee for any media journalist. “I don’t give a rat’s a[–] what the world thinks,” he said in an early April interview with the Hollywood Reporter.

This cavalier attitude enables Ailes, one of TV’s inestimable talents, to say stuff that makes no sense. Like this: “[I]t looks like Hillary is going to do whatever she wants and the press is going to vote for her.”

Problem No. 1: Ailes, as head of cable TV’s dominant news channel, can’t refer to “the press” as some kind of Otherworld. Fox News is the press, too. As the Hollywood Reporter piece notes, Fox News will generate $2.18 billion in revenues this year. That kind of money can fund all kinds of journalism on Hillary Clinton, and surely it will.

Problem No. 2: Has Ailes been following the news? Did he miss the March 2 New York Times story on Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account during her tenure as secretary of state? And the utter and overwhelming media pile-on that followed? Around the time that the interview came out, the Times also reported that three media outlets — the Times itself, the Washington Post and Fox News — had reached arrangements with author Peter Schweizer to rifle through early copies of his book “Clinton Cash” to vet his claims that “foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return,” as the Times summed up the book.

Which is to say, the “press” is actually scrambling to hold Hillary Clinton to account.

Though Ailes may be guilty of some imprecision on the Clinton front, he distinguishes himself in diagnosing the shortcomings of the competition. Of cratering MSNBC, Ailes told the Hollywood Reporter, “They have to decide what they are. I don’t think they even view it as television. They view it as a place to express their views, which happen to be all the same view. And so you’ve got one topic and 12 people [with the same opinion], and it’s just boring.” Yes, must-agree TV.

by the Associated Press.

SOUTH GATE, California.

The U.S. Marshals Service said Tuesday that it’s reviewing a video that shows a deputy grab a woman’s cellphone from her hands, smashing it to the floor.

In the 53-second video posted on YouTube on Sunday, a woman on the sidewalk appears to be filming officers with her cellphone and making comments when a deputy U.S. Marshal charges at her.

The video was spotted by a South Gate police officer because its caption mentioned the department, and an investigation ensued, Capt. Darren Arakawa said.

No South Gate police were involved in the incident, which has generated dozens of phone calls and email complaints to him and the department’s chief from across the United States, Arakawa said. His officers were securing the area Sunday for an ongoing taskforce operation related to theMongols Motorcycle Club, he said.

There was no complaint initiated by the woman involved to police, Arakawa said. But he noted “we have an obligation to look at it, and that’s exactly what we did.”

“We really want to put it out there, because we have to explain to people, to residents, that this wasn’t a police officer,” Arakawa said. “We keep getting these emails suggesting that we’re corrupt. I think it’s an isolated incident that does justify some sort of investigation.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Beatriz Paez, 34, said she feared for her life during the confrontation. She said she was out on a stroll Sunday afternoon when she came upon what appeared to be a massive federal operation — a stretch of street was blocked off and up to 10 people were on their stomachs with their hands on their heads.

She took out her cellphone and began filming. But the men wearing tactical vests that read “police” on the back noticed and started backing up to obscure her view.

The men stood with their backs to her and she made comments including “You need to stay away from me, I don’t feel safe with you closer to me.”

Paez said the deputy marshal who ultimately charged her grabbed the phone from her hand and smashed it to the ground — he then kicked a plastic cup down the street that she’d dropped in the struggle.

The phone’s screen is shattered and doesn’t work, according to her attorney Colleen Flynn,  but they will be trying to recover Paez’s video from the phone’s chip.

The U.S. Marshals service declined to comment further on the video aside from confirming in a statement that their deputy was involved and that the matter was under review.

Hector Villagra executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.

“There is no situation in which an officer can intentionally grab and destroy a camera being used to lawfully record law enforcement,” Villagra said. “The officer’s conduct is a blatant and deliberate violation of the Constitution and his duties as an officer to abide by the law.”

 

By Matt Apuzzo and Adam Liptak (the New York Times)

WASHINGTON — Teresa Sheehan was alone in her apartment at a mental health center, clutching what her lawyers said was a small bread knife and demanding to be left alone. San Francisco police officers, responding to a call from a social worker, forced open the door, blinded her with pepper spray and shot her.

It was the kind of violent police confrontation that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has frequently criticized in Cleveland; Albuquerque; Ferguson, Mo.; and beyond. But last month, when Ms. Sheehan’s civil rights lawsuit reached the Supreme Court, the Justice Department backed the police, saying that a lower court should have given more weight to the risks that the officers faced.

At the Supreme Court, where the limits of police power are established, Mr. Holder’s Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way to arguments. Even as it has opened more than 20 civil rights investigations into local law enforcement practices, the Justice Department has staked out positions that make it harder for people to sue the police and that give officers more discretion about when to fire their guns.

Police groups see Mr. Holder as an ally in that regard, and that pattern has rankled civil rights lawyers, who say the government can have a far greater effect on policing by interpreting law at the Supreme Court than through investigations of individual departments.

“There is an inherent conflict between people at the Justice Department trying to stop police abuses and other people at the Justice Department convincing the Supreme Court that police abuses should be excused,” said Ronald L. Kuby, a Manhattan civil rights lawyer.

To some extent, conflict is built into the system. The Justice Department’s core mission is law enforcement. It oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, among others. In every administration, it is in the government’s interest for federal agents to have as much leeway, and as little liability, as possible.

 “It’s natural that the instinctive reaction of the department is to support law enforcement interests, even when a particular case may have compelling facts for the individual defendant,” said Neal K. Katyal, a former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration. He said the Justice Department had a duty to tell the court what effect a ruling could have for federal law enforcement agencies.

When police abuse cases make it to the Supreme Court, even if they have nothing to do with federal agents, the Justice Department often weighs in. Last year, the department sided with police officers in West Memphis, Ark., who shot a driver and passenger 15 times, killing them at the end of a chase.

John F. Bash, a Justice Department lawyer in that case, told the justices that “there is some level of reckless driving in response to a police pursuit that authorizes the use of deadly force.” What was certain, he added, was that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity, which shields them from civil rights lawsuits. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed.

Every such victory makes it harder for citizens to prevail when they believe they have been mistreated by police officers. It also adds obstacles for the Justice Department’s own civil rights investigators when alleging police misconduct. That has led to some tense debates inside the department, current and former officials say, as the government’s civil rights and appellate lawyers discussed when the department should weigh in, and on which side. Those debates have led the Justice Department to take more nuanced positions than government lawyers might have otherwise, the officials said.

“Law enforcement officers are routinely called upon to face grave dangers and to make often-unheralded sacrifices, and the law must give them the room to make real-time judgments to protect public safety,” said Emily Pierce, a Justice Department spokeswoman. “At the same time, building trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve and protecting human life and human dignity requires accountability for law enforcement officers. The department recognizes — and is committed to striking — that balance.”

Mr. Holder has called the civil rights division the crown jewel of the department, and it has rarely had such a high profile. Even before it garnered national attention with a scathing rebuke of the Ferguson Police Department after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white officer last summer, the division issued similar reports on other departments, including those in Seattle, Albuquerque, Newark and New Orleans.

Those efforts, along with deeply personal remarks from Mr. Holder about racial profiling, have drawn criticism from police officers who say he has not supported them. But Darrel W. Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said many officers probably did not know how often Mr. Holder’s Justice Department stood with them at the Supreme Court. “He’s sincere,” Mr. Stephens said. “He is supportive of the police.”

Private civil rights lawyers, though, have been frustrated that the Justice Department’s aggressive stance in civil rights reports does not extend to its positions before the Supreme Court. “A report can have an impact on a department for a time,” said Gary Smith, the lawyer for the driver in the Arkansas case. “But case law touches every officer in every department in the country.”

Eventually, he predicted, police departments facing civil rights investigations will challenge the Justice Department on its apparently contradictory positions. “You’re telling the Supreme Court it’s O.K., and you’re doing this to us?” Mr. Smith said.

When Justice Department lawyers argue before the Supreme Court, they typically draw fine distinctions and avoid outright contradictions. But such cases can send seemingly mixed messages. For example, the civil rights division said in December that police officers in Cleveland were too quick to use force against mentally ill people. For support, it cited the federal appeals court decision in the case of the mentally ill woman in San Francisco — the same decision that Justice Department lawyers would argue against a few months later.

Similarly, the Justice Department criticized the Sheriff’s Office in Franklin County, Ohio, in 2010 for using stun guns on inmates while they were handcuffed and posed no threat, or when they committed minor rule violations. In a Supreme Court case to be heard this month, the Justice Department has sided with Wisconsin jail officials who used a stun gun on an inmate after he was handcuffed and taken from his cell for refusing to remove a piece of paper covering a light fixture in his cell.

The Justice Department sees those cases as evidence not of conflict but of how its lawyers strike a balance. In the Sheehan case from San Francisco, despite siding with the police, they argued that officers must make some accommodation for a person’s mental illness when making an arrest. And in the Wisconsin case, they agreed with the inmate about the legal standard needed to prove abuse, even as they again supported the police.

For Mr. Holder, altering the approach to police abuse cases would amount to a major policy change, one that F.B.I. agents and other federal investigators would surely oppose, said William R. Yeomans, an American University law professor who served in senior roles in the civil rights division during the Clinton administration. So when tensions arise, protecting federal agents almost always wins. “Obviously it’s a problem,” he said. “The institutional interests in support of law enforcement are very powerful and very real.”

Because of that history, Steven R. Shapiro, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was unfair to criticize Mr. Holder’s tenure too harshly. The Justice Department has always advocated its law enforcement authority, he said. And the A.C.L.U. often opposes those efforts. But he said no administration had done more to curb police abuses or to force a national debate over the issue.

“Civil rights has a voice at the table more often and more prominently under this administration than in previous administrations. It’s not merely symbolic,” he said. “To the extent there is dissonance, we’re noticing the dissonance because the civil rights voice is more prominent than in the past.”

by Philip Bump (The Washington Post)

When we speculated last fall that a campaign run by political action committees was on the horizon — an electoral system that operates completely separately from the candidate — it seemed a bit like political science fiction, a rise-of-the-robots future to contemplate.

Well, the robots are here.

Jeb Bush’s imminent presidential campaign is expected to outsource a great deal of its campaign efforts to Right to Rise PAC, according to the Associate Press. The report, which cites several unnamed confidantes of the Bush organization, outlines how Right to Rise will function as Bush’s campaign exoskeleton. It will reportedly run television spots and direct mail, and may also operate the campaign’s field program — that is, voter contact — up to and including Bush’s get-out-the-vote efforts.

There are enormous advantages to a strategy like this, and only one real — if significant — downside. The advantages:

1. The PAC can raise much more money than the candidate.Federal campaign contribution limits apply only to Bush, not Right to Rise. Donors can only give Bush $2,700, maximum per primary and general election. They can give Right to Rise as much as their little hearts desire.
2. The PAC can coordinate with other PACs.Right to Rise can share information and strategy with any other PAC that might want to weigh in on behalf of Bush. Let’s say he gets the endorsement of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity. Once we clear the skies of flying pigs, AFP and Right to Rise could work together to figure out where to send AFP’s battalions of grass-roots volunteers or how to divvy up spending on mail. They can do this now, of course, but usually PACs are working to compliment a campaign structure, not to compose it.
3. Right to Rise can have Bush help fundraise.In March, the Post’s Matea Gold wrote about the rise of PACs in political campaigns, noting that candidates can still appear at fundraisers for affiliated PACs, although they can’t ask for more than $5,000.
4. It frees up Bush to spend a lot less time on the exhausting process of raising money.That said, Bush will have to spend far less time trying to raise money into his own campaign. He’ll need some, of course — he needs to travel and so on — but far less than if he were also buying TV spots and running scores of field offices and so on.

And that one downside? Bush can’t coordinate with Right to Rise. At all. Once Bush is a candidate, he and Right to Rise cannot strategize about what each is doing. Right to Rise could put out a mail piece making an argument that Bush objects to, in theory, and Bush can’t prevent that from happening. Of course, it will help that, as the National Journal reports, a top Bush strategist appears to be moving over to Right to Rise.

This downside, by the way, is replete with loopholes. The boundaries of what counts as coordination are constantly being tested by campaigns and by PACs. You might remember Mitch McConnell releasing that weird footage of himself in various campaign-friendly locales; that was so PACs had B-roll footage of him for their ads. Or maybe you remember the Republican strategy to share poll numbers by posting cryptic tweets — an effort to get around the stipulation that poll numbers not be shared between campaign organizations and PACs unless the numbers are made public.

There’s also the loophole that Bush can’t coordinate with Right to Rise once he’s a candidate. Right now, while he’s still “deciding” whether he’ll run, he can talk to Right to Rise all he wants. It’s only once he makes his official declaration that the (gauzy) wall goes up. So right now, Bush and the PAC could be talking about, oh, having the PAC run TV and what the messages will be and so on — the toplines of which are exactly what the AP reported.

A campaign like this was an eventuality. In 2004, five campaigns were outspent by outside groups. In 2012, 32 were. In 2014, 28 campaigns were outspent by outside groups — to the tune of $216.5 million dollars, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.  In most cases, that spending has been single-issue organizations trying to secure victory for a candidate who passed their litmus test. But, as in the Republican Senate primary in Mississippi last year, they’ve also worked together, sharing information, data and strategies.

“This isn’t the product of some genius thinking,” one of the AP’s insiders said. “This is the natural progression of the rules as they are set out by the FEC.” Which is correct. The FEC, hobbled by a partisan split among its commissioners, has defaulted to tacit approval of any gray areas, into which campaigns are happy to step. It’s not without risk, particularly if members of the campaign can’t resist the urge to figure out how to work with the PAC. The benefits are much larger.

It’s early, and this is an early report. But a PAC-led campaign was going to happen at some point, and given the scale of resources needed for a presidential race, it makes sense (in retrospect) that it would happen first at that level. If Bush doesn’t win, it’s unlikely to curtail the trend.

Or, as they might say in science fiction: The future has arrived.