Any bets that the FBI does in fact make a criminal referral on Hillary and the Justice Department will not advance the case for prosecution? Anyone? Maybe they will use the ‘implicit bias’ against women as a reason….. Sheesh, read on, ensure your seat belt is securely buckled.
Exclusive: Justice Department mandates ‘implicit bias’ training for agents, lawyers
Reuters: The U.S. Justice Department will announce on Monday that more than 33,000 federal agents and prosecutors will receive training aimed at preventing unconscious bias from influencing their law enforcement decisions, department officials told Reuters.
The training will bring Justice Department employees in line with many local police departments across the country that have implemented bias prevention plans following a spate of shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers.
Nationwide protests following those shootings blamed police bias for unnecessary use of force against minorities.
The department had been criticized for not developing its own policies to combat bias after recommending local police do so at the direction of a task force created by President Barack Obama after riots in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.
In a memo to Justice Department employees obtained by Reuters, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said the program targets “implicit biases” – subtle, unconscious stereotypes or characterizations nearly everyone makes about certain groups of people.
“But implicit bias also presents unique challenges to effective law enforcement, because it can alter where investigators and prosecutors look for evidence and how they analyze it without their awareness or ability to compensate,” Yates said in the memo.
The training will be mandatory for all Justice Department agents and prosecutors and will be rolled out over the next year, Yates said.
Arrest data compiled by some police departments have shown that black and Hispanic men are more likely to be stopped by police than others, suggesting officers may be exerting implicit bias in deciding whom to question or apprehend.
The Justice Department will use a model developed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit organization that provides expertise on policing issues, designed to make people aware of attitudes they may hold about certain races, genders, nationalities and other characteristics.
The Justice Department employs more than 5,800 attorneys and 28,000 law enforcement agents across four agencies: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the U.S. Marshals Service.
Police departments such as those in Baltimore, New York City, Seattle, New Orleans and Los Angeles have training programs in place that help officers recognize biases they may carry but not be aware of following a national outcry against police bias in minority communities.
Asked why the Justice Department only now has begun such training for its employees, Yates said success in local jurisdictions caused the federal government to consider it as well.
“This program has been so well-received by our state and local counterparts, we thought it was something we should be offering to our federal agents, frankly, to get our own house in order,” Yates said in an interview with Reuters.
Yates and the heads of other Justice Department components will begin their own implicit bias training course on Tuesday. Attorney General Loretta Lynch will announce the initiative in Phoenix on Tuesday when she travels there as part of her community policing tour, said a Justice Department official.
Department of Homeland Security employees, which include 60,000 border patrol officers and agents, will not be subject to the training.
Yates said the Justice Department hopes to serve as a model for other federal agencies that have not yet addressed implicit bias.
**** We already have a bias at Justice, and training for more to the left?
As a former lawyer at the Justice Department noted about Loretta Lynch in her confirmation hearing some factual details about the departments at Main Justice:
Bias in Hiring:A devastating report by the Department of Justice inspector general in 2013 found deep polarization, mismanagement, and harassment of conservative employees as well as a litmus test imposed in hiring attorneys in the Civil Rights Division — namely, experience with liberal civil-rights organizations, which translates to experience working for the institutional Left. In short, only ideological allies need apply. As a result, the inspector general’s report found that the Civil Rights Division “passed over candidates who had stellar academic credentials and litigation experience with some of the best law firms in the country” and recommended that this litmus test be abolished. Former assistant attorney general Tom Perez specifically rejected reforms to end the biases in Civil Rights Division hiring. Will Lynch commit to implementing the recommendations made by the DOJ inspector general for more equitable and non-partisan attorney hiring? What will she do to stop the harassment of career employees not considered “liberal enough” that is outlined in the IG report? Free Speech Over the last six years, the Justice Department has brought a series of flimsy civil cases against peaceful abortion-clinic protesters under the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). Case after case has been thrown out by federal courts, often after a scolding by the judge that the case lacked merit. These cases squelched the First Amendment rights of anti-abortion protesters, who may have been the victims of political targeting. In one case, the court assessed sanctions that the DOJ didn’t even appeal. What will Lynch do to fix this problem? Will she commit to requiring higher evidentiary findings in any recommendation for new prosecutions against religiously motivated abortion protesters?Department Misconduct:Two individuals remain employed in important positions at the Justice Department despite findings that they engaged in gross prosecutorial misconduct or outright perjury. One is Karla Dobinski. Dobinski is a lawyer who was involved in a prosecution against New Orleans police officers for civil-rights violations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Dobinski was tasked with serving as head of the “taint team” to protect the defendant police officers’ constitutional rights. A scathing opinion by federal judge Kurt Engelhardt points out that a number of DOJ lawyers, including Dobinski, engaged in a secret blogging campaign during the course of the trial to leak evidence about the case, as well as to bolster or weaken the credibility of trial witnesses. Yet Dobinski still is employed by DOJ. She even works in the component currently investigating other police departments. Will Lynch agree to review the matter for possible disciplinary action against Dobinski? Another Justice Department employee, Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi, was found to have engaged in perjury during the course of the DOJ inspector general’s 2013 investigation. This wasn’t any ordinary perjury, since it involved the integrity of American elections. According to the IG report, Gyamfi, who works in the Voting Section, was asked about confidential internal legal memoranda leaked to the Washington Post. She denied any knowledge of the leaks until she was confronted with documents showing her participation. The IG report says she told IG investigators that she “did not regret posting comments online, except to the extent that it resulted in questioning from the OIG.” Yet she still works in the very same Voting Section and has been neither disciplined nor terminated. Will Lynch agree to review the matter for possible disciplinary action against Gyamfi? When judges accuse DOJ lawyers of prosecutorial abuse or other such misbehavior, as has happened in numerous cases over the past six years, what actions will Lynch take to discipline or terminate those employees?Funding Democratic Political Databases:The Justice Department has been moving tax money toward a voter database used by Democratic candidates. Catalist is a massive database containing voter files used by left-wing organizations that is so inaccurate that an organization using its database was the subject of numerous complaints in Virginia in 2012 for sending voter-registration applications to “dead relatives, children, family members in other states, non–U.S. citizens . . . and residents’ cats and dogs.” The Justice Department has been funding experts and political-science professors in its litigation who used Catalist in various ways. Will Lynch agree to stop using Catalist data? Racialist Assaults on Voter-ID Laws The Justice Department has hired expert witnesses to attack election-integrity laws who have testified that blacks are “less sophisticated” than whites and therefore less able to “figure out” how to register, comply with voter-ID requirements, or get to the polls to vote. The DOJ has paid these professors hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide this offensive testimony. Does Lynch agree with this testimony, or will she terminate the contracts of experts who have such a patronizing view of black voters? Does she believe, as Eric Holder does, that voter-ID laws are racist, and does she disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision upholding such laws in 2008 in Crawford v. Marion County? Most important, the 2013 IG report makes it clear that Eric Holder and others in the leadership of the Civil Rights Division demoted the head of the Voting Section, Christopher Coates, because Holder did not want Coates to pursue cases where whites were being discriminated against and because Coates was asking attorney applicants whether “they would be capable of enforcing the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral manner.” In other words, it seems that Holder did not believe in the race-neutral enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws such as the Voting Rights Act. Lynch should be asked if she shares this view that the Voting Rights Act protects only blacks and other minority groups from discrimination. Such a view should disqualify anyone from being attorney general.The Death Penalty and Racial Bias in the Justice System:Lynch said in 2002 that the application of the death penalty against blacks and Hispanics evidenced a systematic disregard for minority citizens. Lynch would not apply the death penalty even if it could be applied perfectly, according to a 2002 Vera Institute of Justice report, simply because of its supposed disparate impact on minorities. “You can be as fair as possible in a particular case, but the reality is that the federal death penalty is going to hit harder on certain groups,” she said. Although the death penalty is less common in federal prosecutions, if Lynch is confirmed, she will likely face death-penalty decisions, particularly in terrorism prosecutions. Given her race-based opposition, Lynch should be asked whether she will refuse to authorize her prosecutors to seek the death penalty because of the race of the accused or whether she will recuse herself from such decisions.In April 2014, Lynch participated in a conference in New York City organized by the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The DOJ report on the conference had a list of “action items” that included the statement that “racial bias is pervasive” in our society, a claim that most Americans would disagree with and for which the evidence is, at best, equivocal. It is critical for members of the Senate to determine whether Lynch shares the view that racial bias is pervasive and, if so, how that will affect her decision-making as attorney general. Immigration Enforcement and Prosecutorial DiscretionEric Holder and President Obama have stretched the concept of prosecutorial discretion beyond recognition in order to avoid enforcing federal statutes they disagree with on policy grounds. Lynch must be asked whether she believes that the president’s immigration policy is constitutional and whether she believes that, as attorney general, she can refuse to enforce a federal statute against whole categories of offenders. This includes refusing to enforce federal drug laws in states that have decriminalized or legalized marijuana. This last question is particularly important, because it is also related to other issues, such as the refusal of DOJ to present the contempt citations of Eric Holder and Lois Lerner to a federal grand jury. Federal law (2 U.S.C. §194) requires the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, currently Ronald Machen, to bring such a contempt citation before a federal grand jury for action.Machen has refused to do so. Does Lynch believe it is appropriate for the U.S. Attorney not to comply with this federal statute? Under Eric Holder’s leadership, the department where we formerly worked has been politicized to an unprecedented extent. These confirmation hearings are vital to finding out whether Loretta Lynch will continue policies that have damaged the administration of justice and the reputation of the Justice Department, or whether she will put the department back on the path toward being a highly professional, objective law-enforcement agency dedicated to the rule of law. Read the full article here from National Review.
