Sam in the City: What Does It Mean When the Department of Justice Investigates Your Local Police?
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Hi folks, welcome to another episode of Broken Pothole Special Sam in the City. I'm your host Sam Stone. Welcome to the program. Today we're going to be talking once again about municipal issues from a conservative perspective, something that just isn't out there very much, and we hope this can be informative. Let's get going.

First up today, Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York City, came out yesterday, late yesterday, with a plan to address rising crime throughout New York City. They are reinstating the NYPD street patrols. Those are plainclothes patrols, undercover patrols in key areas throughout the city that were one of the main complaints of progressive activists yesterday.

and were done away with by Debozo. Blasio, who cares what his name is, the worst governor, excuse me, the worst mayor in the history of New York City, has been replaced by what appears to be a pretty solid mayor. I always prefer a Republican, but as far as leadership from the Democrat side goes, this was not bad, ladies and gentlemen. Adams bringing back those street patrols, enhanced enforcement, going to try to get the guns off the streets, but most importantly,

He took the time in his proposal to call out the George Soros Open Society lackeys in the prosecutor's office in Albany, New York, in all these other places that are coddling criminals, that are letting criminals back out on the street and creating all this chaos. And I commend Mayor Adams and his team for having the courage to do that. It's not something we've heard any other Democrat anywhere in this country do.

So congratulations there. A couple of quick hits from the City Journal today. Once again, folks, cityjournal.org. Check them out. I think you will actually really appreciate the news they are bringing. Two things. First, San Francisco's Village of Pain. The tenderloin has been completely overrun. One of the most beautiful places in any city in the country has been turned into an absolute nightmare. It is a disaster of pain.

Open air drug use, defecation, all sorts of terrible criminal activity, cars being broken into, citizens being assaulted, stores being robbed, and it's not getting better. Mayor London Breed, who needs to take some Mayor Adams lessons, maybe she should pay attention to the stuff he's doing and just copy it, has instead created what Tenderloin residents are now calling Hamsterdam.

Yeah, if you've seen The Wire, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Fantastic program from HBO years ago. They have created a place for drug users to do any type of drugs they want under semi-government supervision. Actually, there's no medical supervision. There's no professional supervision. Instead, they hired a group of progressive activists to oversee this program.

And apparently they gave them some Narcan for the people that OD on the site. Folks, this is straight up illegal. It is straight up illegal and they are blocking the press from access to this facility. At least they're doing so when they don't trust that press will spin it exactly the way they want. Ladies and gentlemen, this is an issue that we need to take on. Either you start getting people focused on a new approach to get drug users into treatment,

The problem we're seeing in America's inner cities with homelessness, crime, and blight is going to continue to grow. The fentanyl epidemic is exploding across this country. Frankly, if you are under, I think it's 30 or 50, there's actually more people in the last two years who have died of fentanyl overdoses than have died of COVID.

quote me on that you can double check but i'm pretty sure that's the case and so folks this is a crisis of unbelievable proportions and we're seeing the same effects that we saw within the 1990s with crack cocaine epidemic the it is destroying inner cities it's destroying communities destroying families and now you have politicians who are actually enabling it it's just unbelievable

Another piece from them today, Under the Shed Downtown. This is about building facade inspections in New York. I'm going to just touch on this really quickly, folks. This is a government scam, and that's really what it amounts to. Pretty regularly, buildings in New York are required to inspect their facades to make sure they're safe, that they're not going to be shedding pieces onto the sidewalk below, which is entirely reasonable.

But what's unreasonable are all the restrictions they have included, which are clearly designed to help their union allies, then it has absolutely everything to do with union jobs, nothing to do with safety. So if you are inspecting a high-rise facade, generally what they will do is like a window washer, they bring a crane down from the roof, that sort of thing. There's no actual construction work going on. Despite that,

Buildings are required to erect those sidewalk sheds that have become very familiar to New Yorkers all over the place. These things are incredibly expensive. And just to inspect a facade of a building could cost anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a million dollars. A million dollars! Just to inspect it, not to actually do any work to maintain or fix it. Folks, if you wonder why rents are so high in most of our major cities, this is yet another perfect example of government running up the costs

to benefit their friends and system insiders. That is the reason we have housing that costs three times, low-income housing that costs three times to build by the government, but it costs the private sector to build good quality apartments in the same cities, in the same areas. This is just absolutely absurd. Yet another example of government placing the interests of government ahead of the interests of citizens.

Now, today's a big news and what we're talking about, the DOJ and DOJ consent decrees. Folks, this is something that I don't think a lot of people understand what's going on because the DOJ and the Civil Rights Division have come into cities across this country and they come in on the pretext of investigating your police department for racial or some sort of injustice issues.

And frankly, this is yet another liberal jobs program. In fact, the entire DOJ Civil Rights Division is nothing but a progressive jobs program. The best thing anybody could do would be to fire the entire pack of hounds. But what they do, they come in, they go over all the practices and policies, procedures of your police department, and then they create consent decrees that are supposed to improve policing. And they're supposed to make it more fair and just.

Well, here, very quickly, I'm going to give you a list of some of the cities that they've come into. And some of these, I'm going to give you the date, the day, the year, the reforms began. And you tell me if you think that policing in these cities has become more fair, just, or equitable. And then secondly, we're going to talk about whether it's actually helping protect citizens.

Baltimore, Maryland, reforms began in 2017. Newark, New Jersey, 2016. Ferguson, Missouri, 2016. Cleveland, Ohio, 2015. Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2015. Puerto Rico, 2013. New Orleans, 2013. East Haven, Connecticut, 2012. Detroit, Michigan, 2003.

Yonkers, New York. The list goes on and on and on. In fact, it goes back. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1997. New Jersey State Police came under their hammer in 1999. Washington, D.C., 2001. Los Angeles, 2001. Folks, this is insane. So here they have come into the city of Phoenix, and what they are doing is saying that they are going to look at certain practices of the city's police department, the Phoenix Police.

Whether our department uses excessive force, and these are the same pretty much everywhere. Whether the police department engages in discriminatory policing practices. I'm going to back up. Let's go through these one more time. Excessive force. When we've had cases of that, there is absolutely no question those officers should be held accountable, and they have been.

Over and over and over again, Chief Jared Williams and the Phoenix Police Department have stepped up, conducted full and thorough investigations of our police department, and they have held officers who have stepped out of line accountable. In fact, to the point that many of us believe they have overstepped what's necessary and right and become a little too political about it. But yet, that's not enough for these nutjobs at the DOJ Civil Rights Division. It is absolutely insane what they're doing. Here's things.

Whether we violated people's First Amendment rights by retaliating against people who are engaged in protective, expressive activities. Whether the city and its police department respond to people with disabilities in a way that violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. And if the department unlawfully seizes or disposes of the belongings of individuals experiencing homelessness. Well, folks, we addressed excessive force.

In the police department, then the second accusation is they engage in discriminatory policing practices. Well, here's the fact, and this is every police department in America these days. Policing deployments are based on stats, crime stats. We send cops where they are needed. Now, where is the most crime in Phoenix and every other major city around this country? It is in poor and minority neighborhoods.

So of course there are additional resources and more officers in those areas than in wealthier, often more white areas. This is not a reflection of discrimination in any way, shape or form. It is absolutely 100% a reflection of necessity, folks. People need to be protected. They have a right to walk down the street without being accosted, assaulted or robbed. And we're not able to do that in many cities because of the DOJ.

And I'm going to talk about the effect they've had on everyday citizens with these consent decrees and all their practices. The DOJ is making America less safe. That's right. Our own Department of Justice is making Americans less safe and putting American lives at risk because they have been entirely overtaken by woke ideology from the top. And this needs to end.

I am absolutely hopeful that the next president, next Republican president, please, dear God, let that be in 2024 before this incompetent White House continues to take this country down with it.

But when that happens, the first thing they need to do is exactly what the new Attorney General of the state of Virginia did, which is walk into that office on day one and fire every single individual in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Just like they did in Virginia when they walked into the State Attorney General's office and fired the entire Civil Rights Division there. These are activists. They have no business trying to enforce the law. Period. But let's go to the next. Retaliating against individuals who are engaged in protected expressive activities. Well, folks,

In 2020, as I refer to it, the 2020 summer of love, with the mostly peaceful protests where they burned cities down, burned police departments to the ground, attempted to burn federal buildings down with people inside of them, that was mostly peaceful. But when the Phoenix Police Department goes out and arrests individuals attempting to do the same type of things here, that's discrimination. Folks, this is horseshit.

It's horse shit and you should not stand for it. You should not stand for it in Phoenix or anywhere else. People have a right to protest. No question about it. People have a right to gather peaceably. This is what the Constitution says. You have a right to peaceably assemble and ask for redress of your grievances. You do not have a right to loot, rob, burn, destroy. None of it.

But yet somehow the DOJ's Civil Rights Division thinks that saying that you can't do those things and arresting people who are coordinating attempts to do so is discriminatory. It's absolute garbage. And this is what they've done elsewhere, and it is destroying cities. Next.

Whether the police department responds to people with disabilities in a way that violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. Well, you know what? Absolutely. A police department, fire department, any other government agency has a responsibility to treat Americans with disabilities with dignity and respect. There's no question about that. But that does not mean allowing them to violate the law. That does not mean allowing them free reign to do whatever they wish simply because they're disabled. They have to follow the law just like everybody else.

And so you enforce the law equally across the board. You do not discriminate. We do not. Nor does any other city I know. The leadership in every city I know is desperately concerned with not being seen as discriminatory. And it does everything they can to avoid it. And yet that's not enough. What the DOJ is asking for is not equality.

They are asking for people to be treated special. That's not American, folks. We don't treat anybody special. You're not special. I'm not special. Nobody here is special. We are citizens of the United States, and that is the only thing that makes us special, is that we are all equal under the law and equal in front of God. That is the truth. Next, and this is one I really have a problem with, folks. If the department unlawfully seizes or disposes of the belongings of individuals experiencing homelessness...

Yeah, those are just shopping carts full of absolute shit that the police department runs across. And, you know, look, they're abandoned oftentimes in alleys and backyards and in arroyos and riverbeds and all these things, waterways. These...

This is crap. This is dirty paper, dirty clothing, garbage needles everywhere, all this stuff. And somehow we're supposed to collect all this stuff up, catalog it, and preserve it on the odd chance that some homeless person who left it behind wants it back. You have got to be fucking kidding me, folks. Exactly how many warehouses full of garbage do you think every city in this country needs to maintain? Sure, if there are items there of actual value...

Those should and are cataloged, preserved, and protected. If there are documents, IDs, and those sorts of things, and they're identifiable. In other words, if you've crumpled up your birth certificate and used it to wipe your butt with, that's no longer a birth certificate, it's trash. Okay? That's the deal.

So we don't have a responsibility to maintain their belongings. No. Unless there's value to them. No, we do. But somehow the DOJ thinks we should just fill up warehouse after warehouse with this stuff. I mean, this is garbage. This is absolute garbage. We have a bunch of progressive activists here who think you should never throw away any trash that these people leave behind. It's a joke.

It's an absolute joke and they're doing this all across the country. But I want to bring up something that is going on with this that I think is critically important to understand. Here's some of the cities that have had fairly recent consent decrees enforced on them by the DOJ and the violent crime increases two years after those consent decrees have gone into place. Los Angeles County.

A 61% increase in violent crime. Albuquerque, New Mexico, 36%. Seattle, 27%. New Orleans, 20%. Maricopa County, 19%. Cleveland, 13%. Baltimore, 11%. That's right. The best case is that the DOJ is going to come in and create conditions where there's going to be a 10% rise in crime in your area. They need to be tossed out.

And there's really only a handful of cities that have fought back against these guys because like you have here in Phoenix where our progressive mayor Kate Gallego welcomed them in and will certainly agree to whatever they ask for, there's a couple of cities that have fought them off and those cities have done much better.

better. None of these cities that have the DOJ snooping up their police butts have actually improved the quality of policing, they haven't improved the quality of life for their citizens, and they haven't improved the equality with which people are treated.

None of that has happened. What has happened is that the DOJ Civil Rights Division has grown massively and been able to hire a lot of their friends into jobs. Once again, this is apparently now the primary purpose of progressive government is simply to take as much money from taxpayers as possible, hassle taxpayers as much as possible, while hiring as many of their friends as they can possibly find room in the budget to do. And when they run out of room in the budget, they make up excuses like this DOJ garbage.

That's what happens. Folks, this has been a Sam in the City Broken Pothole special. We will be back on Friday with another episode. Tune in.