Rahm Emanuel and the Politics of Crime
Yesterday on CNN, Jamaal Bowman began voicing his disgust over the potential appointment of Rahm Emanuel to President-Elect Biden's cabinet. By incredible coincidence, that was exactly when the network experienced “technical difficulties,” and the interview ended.
Oh, modern technology. So tricky.
Let’s talk a bit about why Bowman, and so many others, are angry at the prospect of Emanuel. He’s about as familiar to Biden as potential appointees get, having served as Obama's first Chief of Staff.
He was also House Democratic leader in 2006.
Before that, he directed the finance committee for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, then later served under Clinton as Senior Advisor to the President. Pay attention, because it’s that last part that’s important.
The resume alone is enough to disqualify him for those of us who mistrust the Democratic establishment. But that a woven-into-the-fabric-of-the-status-quo, insider suit is on the short list for a cabinet that was promised to “[look] like America” and “[reflect] the very best of our nation,” isn’t surprising.
It’s Chicago that horrifies.
On October 20, 2014, Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. 16 times. In the back.
The dash cam footage of Laquan’s murder wasn’t released for an entire year. Police claimed Van Dyke feared for his life and that McDonald was a threat. They fought to keep the city’s internal report sealed, and sealed it remained.
For 5 years.
In 2019, the formerly confidential report written in 2016 by Chicago's inspector general, Joseph Ferguson, revealed that 16 fellow officers conspired to cover up the murder, including giving false statements “to exaggerate the threat McDonald posed.”
At least two of the officers untruthfully claimed they heard Van Dyke tell McDonald to drop a small weapon he was holding, and that Laquan repeatedly ignored the officers' calls to stay down.
At least four of the officers present the night of the shooting failed to “visually and audibly record events” with in-car video systems, and withheld or shielded video evidence establishing what actually transpired.
The inspector general recommended the firing of 11 officers.
Four were let go.
Laquan was murdered in the midst of Rahm Emanuel's second term run for office.
The City of Chicago quietly settled with the family for $5 million without releasing the tape, and it wasn't until Emanuel was reelected in 2015 that the video was made public. Even then it was only in response to a judicial order.
When asked in 2019 how he feels about the event, Emanuel said, "This is not the first police shooting in Chicago's history. But it is the shooting that's led to the biggest changes.”
Except it didn’t.
There is no aspect of his mayoral career that Rahm Emanuel didn’t fuck up, but is in policing that he outdid himself in malignancy.
Emanuel resisted federal civil rights investigations into Chicago Police Department tactics and opposed efforts to revamp the civilian police oversight authority. In 2017 Lori Lightfoot, who would later become mayor herself, appeared on CAN-TV’s Chicago Newsroom.
“There were 126 specific recommendations that were purposely designed to be a matrix that fits together, not to be one-off things. There were clearly things you can do on a one-off basis, but the point was to move forward in a strategic, thoughtful way, and that has not happened,” she said.
Also in 2017, a Department of Justice investigation found critical shortcomings in police oversight, and the reporting of misconduct and use-of-force incidents.
The Justice Department announced today that it has found reasonable cause to believe that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) engages in a pattern or practice of using force, including deadly force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. The department found that CPD officers’ practices unnecessarily endanger themselves and result in unnecessary and avoidable uses of force. The pattern or practice results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability, including the failure to train officers in de-escalation and the failure to conduct meaningful investigations of uses of force.
The foundations for Rahm’s “tough on crime” mentality were laid in the 1990s, when he was one of the architects of the Clinton administration’s catastrophic crime policies — policies the Justice Policy Institute found “resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.”
Clinton’s policies were marked by inflexibility and unusual cruelty. When the U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended reducing the penalty for crack cocaine possession — which led to harsher sentences for blacks compared to whites — the administration refused.
The Clinton administration also banned drug offenders from receiving financial aid for college or from living in public housing. In The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander notes that these policies “enacted a lifetime ban on eligibility for welfare or food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense — including simple possession of marijuana.”
Emanuel pressed hard not only for sentencing minimums but for welfare reform, establishing limits on benefits that ultimately contributed to the growth of poverty and homelessness.
Years later he did some clever revisionist history, calling welfare reform a tool to “[connect] a generation of children with a culture of work.”
Billions of dollars for prison construction, three-strikes-you’re-out provisions, expanded death penalty sentencing, and mandatory minimums built Clinton’s dark legacy of incarceration, poverty, desperation, and institutional racism.
Rahm Emanuel’s, too.
It’s worth noting that the “tough on crime” nonsense from Emanuel and the Clinton administration was partly a ploy to win votes from Republicans. Joe Biden has already shown himself to be of the mistaken, outdated impression that sweet-talking Republicans by throwing them a bone or 10 is a winning strategy.
And playing nice with the right is Rahm’s specialty. In one of his many pieces for the Atlantic, he delivered this tripe:
Earth to Democrats: Republicans are telling you something when they gleefully schedule votes on proposals like the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and a 70 percent marginal tax rate. When they’re more eager to vote on the Democratic agenda than we are, we should take a step back and ask ourselves whether we’re inadvertently letting the political battle play out on their turf rather than our own. If Trump’s only hope for winning a second term turns on his ability to paint us as socialists, we shouldn’t play to type.
Shut up, Rahm.
Taking on a “reach-across-the-aisle,” feckless centrist with a history of civil rights violations, coverups, and absolute disregard for human rights and for the Black community would be not only an insult to progressives and an abdication of Biden’s promises…
It would be a declaration of war.
Rahm Emanuel's involvement in the Obama administration was the first sickening sign that progressives had been had.
So in other words, we're back to the status quo with false promises that things would change.