Trump’s police “immunity” pledge could spell trouble for the black community

Donald Trump’s vow to offer police officers “immunity from prosecution” if re-elected to the White House signals a threat to Black and brown communities, legal experts and advocates warn.

The Republican presidential candidate has repeatedly vowed to permit law enforcement to do their job without restrictions, a stark contrast to the 2020 movement for Black lives that included mass protests demanding police accountability in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and other police activities -involved deaths.

“We will give power back to our police,” Trump told supporters at a rally last week in Waukesha, Wisconsin. “We will provide them with immunity from prosecution.” The twice-impeached and four-time-impeached former president made an analogous statement in December 2023 at a campaign event in Iowa, where he promised to “compensate” police officers to guard them from prosecutorial harm.

“If the police are not held criminally accountable for criminal behavior, then the fox is guarding the hen house and we are the chickens and we live in a country that is becoming a police state,” said Maya Wiley, a lawyer and civil rights attorney who served as counsel to the New York Commission Civilian Complaint Review Board, the police watchdog.

But she noted that Trump wouldn’t have the power he claims if he were elected president in November. She explained: “The president of the United States does not have the authority to tell states that they must exempt state-controlled police forces from crime.”

But critics warn that the US president’s support for police “immunity” doesn’t bode well for already vulnerable communities which were over-policed ​​and mistreated in the past.

“Trump sees the darkest periods of police brutality and mass incarceration as hallmarks of the ‘good old days,’ and he intends to bring them back,” said Markus Batchelor, national political director at People For the American Way. “He has made clear his preference for state violence to silence dissent or achieve his political goals.”

Batchelor highlighted Trump’s tendency to condone police brutality and violence, including encouraging “violence at his rallies,” ordering the military to “assault peaceful protesters,” and inciting the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

While some police officers have been convicted lately of abusing or murdering unarmed, innocent Black victims — most notably six Mississippi state troopers who abused and brutally tortured two Black men in January 2023 — legal experts emphasize that law enforcement has already significant legal knowledge of security.

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“We still live in a system that does not sufficiently hold police accountable,” said Wiley, a former New York City mayoral candidate who has advocated for police reform. “As a nation, we need to do a lot more work and a lot more confronting what we all wanted to confront in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.”

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill intended to deal with police accountability, failed in the U.S. Congress in 2021 because of this of Republican lawmakers’ refusal to budge on reforming special legal protections for police officers, often called qualified immunity. Given the Republican Party’s lack of appetite, Democrats might want to regain a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, maintain control of the U.S. Senate and re-elect President Joe Biden to have any real likelihood at federal police reform.

Despite the failure of the Floyd bill in Congress, Biden has taken executive actions to deal with police accountability, including making a nationwide database to record police misconduct, banning chokeholds and limiting no-knock warrants. However, the president’s actions are only enforceable against federal law enforcement agencies.

The Justice Department under Biden has filled gaps at the state and native levels by opening investigations into misconduct, called pattern or practice investigations. Since Biden took office, the Department of Justice has opened 11 such investigations into police departments, including the Minneapolis Police Department (responsible for Floyd’s murder), the Louisville Metro Police Department, the Louisiana State Police and the Memphis Police Department, following the brutal death of Tyre Nichols in 2023

Criminal justice advocates fear Trump will undermine the Justice Department’s work to carry police accountable. Especially given Trump’s vow to order a historically independent agency to prosecute his political enemies if re-elected, in addition to proposals for the next Republican president to interchange profession federal employees with political appointees.

“He would absolutely shut down (the investigation),” Blake said. “He is a man who claims that he himself should be above punishment. Why on earth would we believe he would want larger local investigations?”

Wiley recalled that while in office, Trump’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, “withheld police oversight and types of reporting on patterns and practices and systemic police misconduct across departments.”

She said Trump “wants to be authoritarian” and every part he has proposed regarding law enforcement suggests he “wants to be a monarch” reasonably than a president who “will protect the constitutional limits of government.”

“Donald Trump is the same racist who entered public life by falsely accusing the Central Park Five and pushing for stop-and-frisk during his time in the Oval Office,” said Jasmine Harris, the campaign’s black media director. “In 2020, when the rest of the nation was broken and rallied to demand justice for George Floyd’s family, Donald Trump questioned his humanity.”