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President Trump met with law enforcement leaders twice this week, saw Jeff Sessions confirmed as top cop, and signed three tough-on-crime executive orders, which were then condemned by an organization composed of some of the nations top law enforcement officers.

Heres how Trumps tough-on-crime week went down:

Trump met with law enforcement brass from major cities on Wednesday and said there would be a "zero-tolerance policy for acts of violence against law enforcement," adding that we need national action to deal with crime in Chicago and declaring that since drugs are "afflicting our nation like never, ever before," we need to be ruthless in the fight against them. "We're going to stop these drugs from poisoning our people," he said.

At the swearing-in of Sessions, he signed three tough on crime executive orders declaring a new era of justice.

"The murder rate in our country is the highest its been in forty-seven years, right?" Trump told a group of county sheriffs he met with on Tuesday, the day before the police chiefs. "Did you know that? Forty-seven years. I used to use that, Id say that in a speech and everybody was surprised, because the press doesnt tell it like it is. It wasnt to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest its been in, I guess, from forty-five to forty-seven years."

In reality, the murder rate is historically low, despite a sharp spike in cities like Baltimore and Chicago over the last two years.

This confab with top cops was taking place at the same time that anti-drug crusader and racist pettifogger Sessions was being confirmed as the chief law enforcement officer in the country.

Law enforcement has already taken on much of the language and tactics of the War on Terror, which in some ways borrowed from the War on Drugs. But Trump further confuses them, complaining to the police chiefs, for instance, about the judicial branch questioning his Muslim ban. "They're taking away our weapons one by one," Trump said, as if the unfettered power of the president is synonymous with effective law enforcement. "This is a weapon that you need, and they're trying to take it away from you.

An executive order signed Thursday morning announced that the administration would begin developing policies that comprehensively address illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violent crime.

Talking to the chiefs, Trump declared that the country supports law enforcement, while the dishonest media tries to convince you it's different," presumably referring to coverage of widespread protests over the past few years in the wake of police killings of unarmed African Americans.

The country may support law enforcement, but law enforcement might not necessarily support Trump. In what should be seen as a stinging rebuke on Friday, a report written by Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, a group comprising nearly two hundred current and former police chiefs, sheriffs, federal and state prosecutors, and attorneys general from all fifty states, rejected Trumps tough-on-crime approach.

In early February, the President signed an executive order creating this Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety at the Justice Department, and signed another order to curb gang and drug activity. The proposal and these orders, however, do not target their language and efforts on fighting violent crimethe most serious threat to our public safety. Instead, they encourage law enforcement to focus on crime more generally. Federal resources are imperative to combat crime across the country, but failing to direct these resources toward our most immediate and dangerous threats risks wasting taxpayer dollars, the report, called Fighting Crime and Strengthening Criminal Justice: An Agenda for the New Administration, reads.

We need not use arrest, conviction, and prison as the default response for every broken law. For many nonviolent and first-time offenders, prison is not only unnecessary from a public safety standpoint, it also endangers our communities, it continues.

The paper was co-authored by David Brown, who was the widely praised police chief in Dallas when five law enforcement officers were shot at a protest there last summer.

Well have to wait and see how the regime responds to these recommendations. But it is likely the administration will push back against a more measured approach to policing because a comprehensive war on crime is a great way to scare the populace and eliminate political enemies, as Nixon aide John Ehrlichman made clear in a conversation with Harpers last year.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," Ehrlichman said. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

If anything, Trump is more paranoid and vindictive than Nixon. And it will be hard for police departments to refuse federal money. Because tons of cops are empowered by the election of Trump, and because policing is one of the few professions where the union is often as powerful as the boss, chiefs who dont support Trumps policies may fall.

Read the original here:
Democracy in Crisis: Trump's Tough-on-Crime Week - The Independent Weekly

The mission of Democracy is to build a vibrant and vital progressivism for the twenty-first century that builds on the movements proud history, is true to its central values, and is relevant to present times.

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We do not seek to publish policy papers; well leave the important details on budget line items and dollar figures to others. Rather, we seek breakthrough thinking on the concepts and approaches that respond to the central transformations of our time: the breakdown of the ladder of upward mobility; the promise and problems of an information-based, globalized economy; new national security threats which cross old boundaries and defy old assumptions from jihadist terrorism and nuclear proliferation to climate change, pandemics, and poverty; and a society where people work and live in new and different ways.

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Under the new proposals, Alan Rusbridger could have faced criminal charges for handling the US intelligence data leaked by Edward Snowden. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

The Law Commissions purpose is to review the state of the law in England and Wales and where necessary to suggest how it should be updated. It is one of those rarely noticed constitutional cogs, an important institution that does important work. The law that relates to official secrets is indeed dated and, in a digital age of global publication, it is also technologically obsolete. Yet this is not at the heart of the proposals the commission is making. Instead, it proposes powers that would herald a new journalistic ice age. Anyone that published an intelligence- or foreign affairs-related story based on a leak would be open to criminal charges. Reporters, as well as the whistleblowers whose stories they tell, would be under threat of sentences of up to 14 years, regardless of the public interest and even if there were no likelihood ofdamage.

This all began in 2015, when the government asked the barrister Professor David Ormerod, the law commissioner for criminal law and evidence, to examine the protection of official data. The date is significant: the Guardian, together with other European and American newspapers, had recently published some of the huge volume of material leaked by Edward Snowden about surveillance techniques. Some of the information had been shared by British intelligence with the US National Security Agency, where Mr Snowden was a contractor. But there were no grounds for legal action, as no British citizen or resident had been responsible for the leaks. Nor could British journalists be charged with collecting and disseminating the material under the Official Secrets Act of 1911, because, in the terms of the legislation, they did not have a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state. That is, they were not spies. In fact, this paper strongly believes that the stories we published were in the public interest. That view is supported by the debate and inquiries that have followed.

The updated 1989 Official Secrets Act would also have been difficult to apply. To secure a conviction for unauthorised publication, the prosecution would have had to show that it had been damaging. This paper was very careful in what information it disclosed. What we published might have been embarrassing, but we believed that it was not damaging. The Law Commissions proposals for a new act appear expressly designed to make sure that if such a thing happened again, this time charges could be brought with confidence. Its proposals require only that someone had been gathering information that might benefit a foreign power or might prejudice the interests or safety of the state. They would not need to involve any intent to pass the information on to a foreign agency. A journalist would merely have to be notified that the information was capable of benefiting a foreign power for its publicationto be banned.

It is not so long ago that the menu in MI5s staff canteen was an official secret. Now the Law Commissions proposals would make it almost impossible for anyone who handles such data to publish anything about security activities that the government preferred to keep secret. If they had been in force three years ago, they would certainly have meant that Alan Rusbridger, the Guardians editor at the time of the publication of the Snowden files, could have faced criminal charges.

Assurances that these tools of state would never be used in an oppressive way look increasingly hollow when the US judiciary is castigated by President Trump for upholding the constitution, while British politicians fail to defend judges here against media attack.

In its report, the Law Commission lists Guardian Media as one of the organisations that was consulted on its proposals. This consultation was brief and informal and ended with a promise, honoured only in the breach, that everyone would be kept informed about the next steps.

News organisations, in an intensely hostile business climate, operate in an ever harsher environment. Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 may yet be brought into force, exposing any news organisation that refused to sign up to the recognised regulator to the full costs of both parties in a libel action, regardless of whether it won or lost. The Investigatory Powers Act, which became law last autumn, has in the words of one lawyer, ripped the heart out of any ability to protect journalistic sources. In this angry digital age of fake news, where hard fact grows ever more precious, accurate and fair reporting has never been more important. Without it, democracy itself is weakened.

Read the original here:
The Guardian view on official secrets: new proposals threaten democracy - The Guardian

The Supreme Court, Jerusalem. (photo credit:Wikimedia Commons)

US President Donald Trump and numerous Likud MKs and ministers believe that the separation of powers means the judiciary should avoid interfering with executive decisions, or with laws passed by the legislature. In other words, they are inclined to belittle the legitimacy of judicial review, under which the courts may review executive and legislative decisions on grounds of unconstitutionality, illegality or unreasonableness.

In Trumps case the issue came up in connection with his executive order, issued on January 27, suspending the US refugee resettlement program for 120 days, restricting entry to the US from seven Muslim countries for 90 days and suspending Syrian refugee resettlement indefinitely.

When Seattle Federal District Court judge James Robart temporarily blocked the executive order on February 3, Trump tweeted: The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned! When on February 9 the San Francisco-based Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower courts ruling, Trumps reaction was that courts seemed to be so political, after he had previously implied that in his opinion the courts are biased. The court itself had rejected the administrations claim that it did not have the authority to review the presidents order.

In Israel the issue of the right of the High Court of Justice to review government policy, as it manifests itself in legislation and policy measures, emerges with growing frequency as Israels current government pursues increasingly controversial policies, which even the legal gatekeepers sometimes find difficult to defend. In reaction, members of the opposition are increasingly resorting to the HCJ in an attempt to redress policies that they claim constitute a danger to Israels democracy and future. Currently the HCJ is being called upon to review the so called Regulation Law that was passed by the Knesset last week, and which the attorney- general has refused to defend in court.

The reactions of the government and its supporters have not been as crass as Trumps reactions, though especially Bayit Yehudi ministers and MKs have been known to attack High Court justices for issuing rulings critical of the governments policies (especially in Judea and Samaria), and one MK Moti Yogev suggested that a bulldozer should be sent to tear down the court.

Trump accused the American federal courts of being political (i.e. liberal), even though the American system ensures that both liberal and conservative judges get appointed over time, with the balance being tilted alternately to one side or the other depending on the identity of the president.

In Israel the argument on the Right is that the system is permanently tilted in direction of the secular, liberal Left, and that as long as the method for selecting new judges is not amended, the bias against religious, conservative judges will continue. It is thus not surprising that there are voices on the Right that would like to change the method of selecting judges, and until that happens limit the ability of the opposition to petition the court on issues on which the Knesset has decided.

While it cannot be ruled out that in future an attempt might be made to force President Trump out of office before his term is over on legal grounds of one sort or another, in Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters are accusing the opposition is trying to oust him from office by means of a flood of media investigations some of which have turned into official police examinations and investigations.

Netanyahu and his supporters are arguing that if the opposition wishes to bring down the government and its head and replace them, it should do so by means of elections, and not legal proceedings against the prime minister that resemble a witch hunt.

The question is whether the accumulation of suspicions regarding the conduct of the prime minister and his family, some related to material benefits received from extremely wealthy acquaintances with or without the latter expecting to receive something in return; some having to do with highly questionable media-related deals designed to ensure Netanyahus remaining in power indefinitely; yet others related to alleged corruption in Israels arms acquisitions, involving persons some of whom are intimates of the prime minister should simply be set aside until Netanyahu is no longer prime minister.

If Netanyahu were accused of outright criminal offenses, the answer to this question would clearly be negative. The current situation is not clear-cut.

However, despite the fact that each of the suspicions against Netanyahu if taken separately dont amount to much, action should be taken immediately, because taken together and over time, all these affairs, combined with Netanyahus constant proclamations he will remain in office for a long time to come (what other prime minister of a democratic state talks like this?) create a highly disturbing picture.

Contrary to what I wrote two weeks ago, Netanyahu has now started accusing the media of spreading fake news in connection with all the examinations and investigations being carried out against him, but without citing a shred of evidence to refute the accusations leveled against him. It is really a question of how the disturbing facts are interpreted. This should be done by the legal authorities, not the lay voters, and the sooner the better.

If the court decides Netanyahu has done no wrong so be it.

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Think About It: The courts and democracy - Jerusalem Post Israel News

On 31 January, during an evening session that was suspiciously secretive, the Romanian government adopted two ordinances changing the countrys penal code. The measures were immediately seen by many as a clumsy attempt to decriminalise certain corruption offences, with the main beneficiaries being the politicians of the ruling party. Street protests broke out during that night, culminating last Sunday in the biggest demonstration since the fall of communism.

These events bring into sharp relief the main features of a volatile situation in eastern Europe where three forces vie for dominance: disconnected and sometimes corrupt traditional politicians, increasingly impatient and angry publics and assertive demagogues.

The east central Europe that shed communism in 1989 is a convenient laboratory to observe the emergence of a new politics. It is not necessarily due to its politicians being more corrupt, its demagogues flashier (who can compete with Trump?) and its publics angrier. It is more because its democracies are still fresher, more basic, their institutions not yet wrapped in a resilient layer of protective pro-democratic cultures. The whole system is thus more exposed to pressure tests.

Such tests should be easier to withstand in countries ensconced in the EUs legal and institutional structures. So that this volatility takes place within the EU provokes, in some, extra disquiet. The EU can and should act against leaders transgressions, for example in Hungary or Poland where the rules of constitutional checks and balances have been dangerously manipulated. But those in western Europe who look at these events with scorn and wonder why certain western values have not extend eastwards might be confounded by recent events, for instance, rising populism in Britain, France and the Netherlands.

The end of communism resulted in the emergence of nearly 30 countries seeking to rebuild their economies, redesign their political systems and reinvent their identities. In the early 1990s, there was no economic blueprint other than some version of what we today call neoliberalism. In politics, the imperative of building liberal democracy was accepted as a holy mantra, regardless of the actual intentions of the builders. In culture, it was let a million flowers bloom after the nightmarish years of censorship. Some countries in central Europe and the Baltic region have achieved remarkable successes on the path to this triple goal. For some time, east central Europeans, though struggling, sometimes suffering and making mistakes, were building solid democratic systems. Then something snapped. No doubt the economic crisis of 2008 played a role, yet that does not explain what happened. In Hungary, the old political systems went into a tailspin in 2006 when the then prime minister admitted his party won elections due to lying. In Poland, the 2008 crisis was less severe than in almost any other country in Europe, yet in 2015 vocally anti-status quo parties won elections.

How to explain this? In east central Europe, as elsewhere, the rise of populism is often explained by a combination of economic and cultural factors. But in this region, economic discontent is frequently directed at the newly instituted neoliberalism, often regardless of its actual results.

According to research from Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, there is a demand side explanation, centring on cultural disorientation rather than economic deprivation. People are warming up to right-wing populist assurances that their traditional world is not totally lost to the post-materialist, cosmopolitan culture promoted by urban elites. In east central Europe, particularly in Poland, this dream of restoring the paradise lost, of the secure home, often takes strong nationalistic overtones, intertwined with a sense of religious superiority. Quite a few politicians on the right assert, sometimes openly: we carry the torch of pure Christianity already irreversibly corrupted in the west.

While these theories explain much, particularly about the demand side of politics, there is additional work to be done on the supply side. Why is there such discontent, for example, in Poland, where the economic situation is better than in many countries that did not acquire a populist government? It may be that the ideological packaging matters. If so, we need to pay more attention to the framing of problems, for example, by skilful demagogues.

The anger can be channelled in many ways. In the not so distant past, it used to be directed leftward, but the demise of communism, followed by the gradual decay of post-communist social democrats, created a severely truncated political field. It now ranges from the murky middle to the far right. The voices of the left are weak. A lack of supply (of political programmes and organisations) from the left swings the demand to the skilful suppliers of the day: rightwing populists. This is clearly visible in the post-communist world.

There is a danger that the anger channelled by populists may overcome weak institutions. That is why east central Europe is such a critical test area. While support for democracy as a desired system is not particularly weak, a set of democracy-sustaining cultural reflexes is not as developed as in elsewhere. A sizable portion of the populace can be convinced, it seems, that the protection of the rule of law and rule-bound governance are not as important as a system that allows unadulterated expression of peoples will. Such a trade-off is the hallmark of populism.

Social anger can be expressed more or less directly or through the medium of an imposing cultural frame. In Romania, where the struggle against corruption has been at the forefront of public life for some time, the anger has been vented directly against corrupt and scheming politicians. In Hungary and Poland (or Britain, France, the Netherlands and the US), it has been channelled through populist frames skilfully promoted by demagogues. This is much more dangerous for democracy. Populists cannot solve problems, but can instil in us that simple solutions exist. We are told such solutions are not hard to implement, but we first must return to our pure collective selves.

Once we swallow the bug of populism we are less likely to rekindle our faith in liberal democracy; it is also difficult to wake up from the somnambulic infatuation with an imagined polarised world where easy diagnoses and simple solutions work.

Professor Jan Kubik is director of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies

Excerpt from:
Brexit can wait. Europe's pressing worry is its fracturing eastern democracies - The Guardian