It’s Not Just About Race, It’s About Power
13th January 2015
On December 2, Attorney General Eric Holder, the top law enforcement official in the country, went to Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church to announce that the Justice Department would soon “institute rigorous new standards-and robust safeguards-to help end racial profiling, once and for all.”
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But by focusing on the role of race to the exclusion of other contributing factors in these cases, both the powerless in the streets and the powerful in the suites were letting an important culprit off the hook: power itself.
Start with the grand jury process that produced both non-indictments. “The system is under the complete control, under the thumb, of prosecutors,” Cato Institute Criminal Justice Director Tim Lynch told CBS News in December. “If they want an indictment they are going to get an indictment. If they don’t want an indictment it won’t happen.”
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In practice, the only class reliably protected by grand juries is people that the local prosecutors don’t actually want to prosecute. Namely, cops. The conflicts of interest here are beyond blatant: Prosecutors absolutely depend on the work and testimony of police to send defendants to jail. Grand juries absolutely depend on prosecutors to present information and guidance on whether to indict. There is no impartial judge, no adversarial check on the power of law enforcement.