Rachel Harmon: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we put aside all the bigger political issues and put aside the unusual events of the last few weeks, and we just compare the Obama and Trump administrations on policies toward police departments, what is the main difference? Not the hot-button issues on the news every night, but the dry, boring stuff. The three things that the Trump administration did and then the things that it said. When Sessions came in as Trump’s first attorney general, he effectively shut down the pattern-or-practice lawsuits that the Justice Department was carrying out. He allowed the ongoing ones to continue, though he tried to get out of the two that were not yet ink dry but had already been negotiated in Baltimore and Chicago. He managed to get out in Chicago, not in Baltimore because the judge wouldn’t let the Justice Department out of the suit. So that was one thing, which is no new investigations or almost no new investigations. They just shut down a program that the Obama administration had pursued very actively. That was one thing. Another thing is that they reversed changes to the military equipment program, 1033, some of which is coming out now in association with the militarism around the protests. And there’s one more, which I am forgetting off the top of my head, but I’ll think of in a minute. Then the other thing that Trump did, President Trump and Jeff Sessions did, is they advocated for more aggressive policing. They advocated “stop, question, and frisk” as a strategy in Chicago and repeatedly valued more aggressive forms of policing. You hear that, again, with Attorney General Barr in repeated advocacy for more aggressive forms of policing, which are harm inefficient, I think. Then President Trump, in his speech in Suffolk County, New York — he advocated allowing officers or encouraged officers to let suspects bang their head on the car door, which was effectively advocating constitutional violations by the police department. Together, all of those things have conveyed a very clear message to police departments that they value aggressive policing and not constitutional or harm-efficient policing. Our very last segment is called the Rachel Harmon production function. It’s about you. Having an engineering degree from MIT — how has it influenced how you think about the law?…

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