Merrick Garland and the DOJ have their work cut out for them because we’re failing our people who most need our help — the children, the mentally ill and the ones who are affected by crime.
Breonna Taylor death: Merrick Garland reveals findings of LMPD investigation
The U.S. Department of Justice released scathing findings from its “pattern-or-practice” investigation into Louisville Metro Police on Wednesday.
Jeff Faughender, Louisville Courier Journal
It’s time we started a GoFundMe for Merrick Garland.
I’m thinking $600,000 or $700,000 should do the trick.
That should buy him a serviceable home in Lake Forest — just a 12-minute drive from the local FBI headquarters, where he could grab an empty office to oversee what seems like the hundreds of investigations his agency has opened into state and local government here.
In reality, the U.S. Department of Justice has only opened four investigations into how government here in Kentucky does its business. It just seems like hundreds.
Maybe because one — the investigation that found Louisville Metro Police has violated people’s civil rights and has shown racial bias in the way it enforces laws — seems to have dragged on forever. And it’s still not finished.
And that doesn’t even count the investigations we don’t know about into crooked politicians and bureaucrats that seem to pop up here from time to time.
LMPD still working on consent decree after damning DOJ report
The LMPD is still negotiating a consent decree, about a year and a half after the DOJ issued its 90-page report that made dozens of findings that suggested that our police leadership hasn’t known what it was doing for years — or that it did know what it was doing and did it anyway.
We should have figured out then that the DOJ was going to have a near-permanent presence here, what with police shooting people, police judge shopping to get search warrants without questions asked, police targeting pedestrians and throwing Big Gulps at them.
It was like they were as lawless as the people they were supposed to be arresting.
But we didn’t know the half of it. Heck, back then, we didn’t even know the quarter of it.
It’s hard to say what has been more disturbing.
The problems in juvenile justice — which has seen the state’s system for locking up kids who break laws intermittently under investigation by the feds since the Clinton administration. Problems got worse five years ago when Louisville said the state wasn’t reimbursing the city enough for housing kids and shut down its youth detention center.
Or whether it’s the way the state relies too heavily on sending people with mental health issues to psychiatric hospitals rather than less restrictive and less traumatizing community-based settings.
DOJ also looking into JCPS busing system inequity
Most recently, Garland’s DOJ said it’s looking at how Jefferson County Public Schools’ busing system puts African American youth at a disadvantage.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the system for decades has relied on shipping Black kids out of Louisville’s West End to desegregate schools and not move white kids into traditionally Black schools.
All this is to say, Garland has his work cut out for him here because we’re failing our people. Many of those who we’re failing are the ones who most need our help — the children, the mentally ill and the ones who are affected by crime.
There’s a lot of blame to go around there, whether it’s state officials from both parties who have failed to provide the mental health services and the juvenile justice services needed to deal with the issues our citizens face or the Jefferson County Board of Education, which has failed to find an equitable way to make sure Black and white students obtain similar educations despite segregated housing patterns that make it difficult to desegregate classrooms.
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And then there is the LMPD — with blame going to various mayors, police chiefs, metro council members, the Fraternal Order of Police and individual police officers who have violated rules and violated rights.
I know what you’re saying — “Dang Joe, $700,000 seems like a lot of money. Can’t we just buy ol’ Merrick a fixer-upper in Chickasaw so he can see many of these problems up close.”
You might be right. Garland might not have long in his job anyway.
If Donald Trump is elected …
If Donald Trump wins in November, he’ll certainly replace Garland, who has drawn Trump’s ire by appointing Special Counsel Jack Smith to bring felony charges against him. And we’re not even sure Kamala Harris will keep him on if she’s elected.
Maybe, we’ll just need an apartment for him.
A major award: Gerth: And the ‘false prophet’ award goes to … Southern Baptist seminary leader Al Mohler
Heck, we don’t know if we’ll even have much of a DOJ presence here after the election. Especially since, in Trump’s first go-round, his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, scaled back the use of consent decrees to force cities and states to follow federal law.
Perhaps, we’ll just need an Airbnb.
But we need Garland here — or whoever might follow him — because it’s abundantly clear we can’t fix these issues ourselves.
Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.
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Publish date : 2024-09-06 04:12:00
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