The American Civil Liberties Union has issued a statement speaking out against the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump Thursday, specifically the order designated to create a task force to address violent crime in the nation and the order to create a task force to address violence against police officers.
Trump signed an order aimed at “reducing crime and restoring public safety” that directs newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to establish a new Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety to develop “strategies to reduce crime, including, in particular, illegal immigration, drug trafficking and violent crime.” The task force would also propose new legislation and submit at least one report to the president within the next year.
The second order directs the Justice Department to “use existing federal law to prosecute those who commit crimes against law enforcement officers.”
It is worth noting that according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, there were 135 officer fatalities in 2016, up 10 percent from 123 in 2015, and while the majority of officers’ deaths from the ’70s through the ’90s were due to firearms, the majority in the 2000s and 2010s have been traffic-related.
In other words, your president is creating a task force to fight against something that isn’t even really happening, and the ACLU picked up on that and spoke out on it.
From the ACLU statement:
Jeffery Robinson, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, had this response:
“President Trump intends to build task forces to investigate and stop national trends that don’t exist. We have seen historic lows in the country’s crime rate and a downward trend in killings against police officers since the 1980s. The president not only doesn’t acknowledge these facts about our nation’s safety, he persists in ignoring the all-too-real deaths of black and brown people at the hands of law enforcement.
“There are some cities that have had recent rises in violent crime, and they deserve help. And every locality in America wants to further reduce crime and violence. But task forces premised on misinformation, and looking in the wrong places for the wrong problems, are not the answer.”
Exactly right. Focusing his attention on solving problems that are nonexistent and making police officers out to be the victims of crime when, in fact, there is a very real epidemic of police killing unarmed citizens seems counterintuitive and dangerous. What type of agenda is the president setting, and to what end?
We are only three weeks into his presidency, and the crazy seems to be ramping up.
At what point will Trump get down to the business of serving the American people instead of catering to his own fragile masculinity and ego?