As Obama heads for the exit, he and his people have gotten a good deal more arrogant. How else does one explain the DOJ Chicago anti-police report. You may have seen it in the news, but Heather Mac Donald at City Journal takes apart just how insanely lazy and worthless it is.
Released on Friday, the report found the Chicago police guilty of a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional force. But it turns out that the Justice Department has no standard for what constitutes a “pattern or practice” (the phrase comes from a 1994 federal statute) of unconstitutional police conduct. “Statistical evidence is not required” for a “pattern or practice” finding, the DOJ lawyers announce, citing unrelated court precedent. Nor is there “a specific number of incidents” required to constitute a “pattern or practice,” they proclaim.
Having cleared themselves of any obligation to provide “a specific number of [unconstitutional] incidents” or a statistical benchmark for evaluating them, the DOJ attorneys proceed to ignore any further obligation of transparency. The reader never learns how many incidents of allegedly unconstitutional behavior the Justice Department found, nor how those incidents compare with the universe of police-civilian contacts conducted by the Chicago Police Department. No clue is provided regarding why the DOJ lawyers concluded that the alleged abuses reached the mysterious threshold for constituting a pattern or practice. Instead, the report uses waffle words like “several,” “often,” or “many” as a substitute for actual quantification.
There are no words. In the past, the DOJ at least pretended to produce something. This is a non-report that the media treats as definitive despite the utter and total lack of evidence of anything.
The report does disclose that the DOJ attorneys reviewed 425 incidents of less-than-lethal force between January 2011 and April 2016. But what proportion of total force incidents those 425 events represent or how many of those 425 incidents the federal lawyers found unconstitutional isn’t revealed.
Nothing seems to be. This is a non-report. It's an anti-report. It's the sort of thing that people who are convinced that they're right and too busy looking for career options before Trump gets in, write up.