By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
The numerous federal investigations into troubled police departments under the Obama administration may be a thing of the past.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Tuesday that the federal government won’t be monitoring police departments as it had in the past.
Sessions claimed in his first speech as attorney general that the Justice Department investigations undermined police efforts nationwide.
“We need, so far as we can, in my view, help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness,” Sessions told the National Association of Attorneys General. “And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that. So we’re going to try to pull back on this, and I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.”
He added that the Trump administration is working “out of a concern to make the lives of people in particularly the poor communities, minority communities, live a safer, happier life so that they’re able to have their children outside and go to school in safety and they can go to the grocery store in safety and not be accosted by drug dealers and get caught in crossfires or have their children seduced into some gang.”
Sessions claimed that monitoring police departments did not help combat rising violence in some cities.
“One of the big things out there that’s, I think, causing trouble and where you see the greatest increase in violence and murders in cities is somehow, some way, we undermine the respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult,” he said.
