Elie Mystal: Trump's Newest Executive Order 'Unleashes' the Cops--and Flirts with Martial Law

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-executive-order-police-martial-law/

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https://archive.li/rJQh1

Holding police officers accountable when they commit crimes or violate the constitutional rights of those they’re allegedly here to “serve and protect” is one of the most difficult things to do in law. The police are protected by powerful, well-funded, and well-lawyered unions. They are protected by the judicial doctrine of qualified immunity, which prevents them from being personally sued for monetary damages when they damage or destroy property or lives. They’re protected by prosecutors and district attorneys who work alongside them and are often reluctant to charge them with crimes. And then, even when police officers are charged with crimes, they are often protected by sympathetic (white) juries who give the cops a pass when they brutalize or harass unarmed citizens. The entire system is designed to help cops get away with crime.

Now Donald Trump has issued an executive order that will make it even harder to hold cops accountable—and flirts blatantly with martial law. Named the dystopian “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals And Protect Innocent Citizens,” this new order purports to “unleash high-impact local police forces; protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials; and surge resources to officers in need.”

The aggressive language in the order could be cribbed from any military police state in the annals of history, and that’s clearly the kind of polity that Trump would like to create and lead. The order instructs the Secretary of Defense to put down the bottle long enough to “determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.” It also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to “advance the objectives of this order.”

Careful readers will note that this sounds an awful lot like the prelude to martial law, a framework where national military assets are deployed in American cities to enforce the president’s priorities. That would, of course, be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the president from using the American military as a domestic police force. But I think it’s well established that Trump has never watched The West Wing and doesn’t respect the rule of law in this country anyway.

*snip*