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August 12th, 2015
Baltimore is turning to the federal government for help in stemming a dramatic uptick in violence over the last several months. Ten federal agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration; the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service will embed with the police department's homicide unit for the next 60 days, city leaders announced Monday.
They join the 20 ATF agents who were sent in last week to form BFED, a joint task force that "is the next step of an all-hands-on-deck movement addressing violence in our community," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said Monday.
There have been 191 killings (this year) in the city of Baltimore, that is completely unacceptable," said Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby. "The police can't do it alone. The state's attorney can't do it alone."
?To some, particularly Al Sharpton, this is a welcomed process. Recall that in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray and the culminating Baltimore riots earlier this year, Mr. Sharpton demanded that the Justice Department to "take over policing in this country," and asserted "we're going to have to fight states' rights in terms of closing down police cases."
Just recently, The Washington Post reported that so far this year, 24 unarmed black men have been shot and killed by police - one every nine days, according to a Washington Post database of fatal police shootings. Those 24 cases constitute a surprisingly small fraction of the 585 people shot and killed by police through Friday evening, according to The Post database. Most of those killed were white or Hispanic, and the vast majority of victims of all races were armed.
However, black men accounted for 40 percent of the 60 unarmed deaths, even though they make up just six percent of the U.S. population. The Post's analysis shows that black men were seven times more likely than white men to die by police gunfire while unarmed.
Others are not so enthralled with the progressive efforts to commingle federal authority with powers regulated to the states.
Opponents feel that the trend toward centralization of criminal justice authority in Washington is a trend toward a de facto national police force, an entity of unparalleled danger to civil liberty.
Keep in mind all of the military hardware that is finding its way into the hands of state and local police.
Again, these federal policing activities are in their infancy, and there may be communities that require federal resources to help make them safe and/or combat unethical behavior. It remains to be seen whether these programs are designed to be permanent or temporary education and training systems to assist local and state governments to be more effective in curtailing crime in their respective areas. We will keep watching these developments.
