RUSH: Now, expanding on the PROMISE Program that we on this program explained to you yesterday. Here’s the upshot of the PROMISE Program. It was started in Chicago by the current superintendent in the school district in Broward. Robert Runcie was in Chicago. The premise of the PROMISE Program is federal grants. This happened under the Obama administration and Eric Holder. The money came from the Department of Justice.
It originated from the premise that the Democrats hold that the prison population is disproportionately minority and African-American because of injustice in America. You have the black population, what, 15, 20%; the prison population of minorities and African-Americans can be 60%. Ergo the justice system must be tainted. This is what Holder and Obama believe. So they believe that bigotry and racism is resulting in charges and convictions against innocent minority perps.
So they began a program called the PROMISE Program which promised money to local police departments and school districts for ignoring certain crimes, mostly misdemeanors, but not contained to misdemeanors. And for all of these crimes ignored, there would thus be no charges. And thus no convictions. And thus there wouldn’t be any sentencing because nobody’d be going to jail. Now, they couldn’t, from Washington, instruct a school district or police department to ignore only crime committed by minorities.
That wouldn’t fly.
People would spot that right off the bat and they would object to it.
So they had to be cagey, and they had to basically extend this policy to types crime rather than types of perp. So various misdemeanors — and some crimes that are above misdemeanor but not full-fledged Class A felonies — were ignored by everybody committing them. And the reward for behaving was federal money. So the incentive to ignore crime was monetized by a program called the PROMISE Program instituted by Obama and Holder under the premise that American prison populations were unfairly and unjustly African-American and minority.
I’m sure you’ve heard Obama and Holder and the Reverend Jackson for years complaining about this. Always at the root of the complaint is that it’s injustice, that innocent people are being charged simply because our just system is racist. But Obama was famous for programs like this. He would… These consent decrees on police departments. Basically take over and implement federal policies.
There would be payments involved if the local police department looked the other way. Obama spread walking-around money out like no president ever has before him. Well, now that this program was announced yesterday, it’s becoming even more widely reported on and known now, and Breitbart has a story: “Broward County Likely ‘Inspiration’ for Obama School Discipline Policy to Report Fewer Arrests, Suspensions.”
Even though the program began in Chicago with Robert Runcie who the current superintendent in Broward County, he was transferred or he was hired away by Broward after the PROMISE Program showed such great results in the Chicagoland area. “The Broward County school district’s adoption of a school discipline policy that was praised by the Obama administration for seeking to reduce the reported number of school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests may have played a role in the fact that Nikolas Cruz remained under the radar until his shooting rampage in Parkland, Florida, on February 14.
“‘The facts pattern that has emerged strongly suggests it played a role,’ [according to] Manhattan Institute senior fellow Max Eden… The Obama-era Departments of Education and Justice — under education secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder — issued school guidelines in 2014” the program actually dates 2013 “that claimed students of color are ‘disproportionately impacted’ by suspensions and expulsions, a situation they said leads to a ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ that discriminates against minority and low-income students. ‘Broward County was the first to have the goal of lowering suspensions, lowering expulsions, lowering arrests,’ explains Eden. ‘And, so, they decided to reduce police involvement by not bringing in cops to arrest kids for a whole range of serious offenses…”
And then as you would expect, the arrests go down when you stop arresting, and that is taken to be a sign of success. Kind of like defining deviancy down. You decide you can’t control this kind of aberrant behavior, so you just say it’s no longer a crime. This behavior is no longer criminal, and you define deviance down. It’s a variation of that.
So the upshot of it is, if this becomes policy, and it was in 2014, that’s four years of policy of ignoring certain crime, of no arrests, no suspensions, all because the Obama administration’s paying you to ignore these things, and in the midst of this, here comes Nikolas Cruz, and here come all these warnings and all these indications that somebody is ready to explode. But you’re in the midst of a four-year plan of ignoring actual criminal behavior. And this hadn’t even reached that yet.
This guy was just a warning sign. But the real thing, then the act happens, then Cruz starts shooting, and now cops don’t go in and pursue him. Could it be that the real reason the cops didn’t go pursue is because they’re under orders to ignore certain kinds of crime in exchange for money coming to the school district? Now, they’re not under orders to ignore murder. That was never part of this. They’re not under orders to ignore people being shot. That was never part of the PROMISE Program, but at the time the shooting begins, nobody knows really what the outcome is in there, but the conditioning has been to ignore crime, don’t make arrests, don’t do suspensions.
And people are beginning to look at this as maybe having a bit of factor, maybe being somewhat of a factor. But the whole program’s stupid. The premise of the program is stupid. The belief that our criminal justice system is so biased and so racist and scores and scores of innocent people are in jail simply because of their race, well, yeah, Obama and Holder would love you to believe that, and the Reverend Jackson and the community organizing groups of the left would love you to believe that. They want people to think America is that unjust and immoral.
Snerdley said to me, if it weren’t for some news story, that this would have been all over the place last night and I’d have been catching hell for it from the Drive-Bys. If it weren’t for some other story covering it up. His point was, “You know, you really exposed something yesterday. And normally they would try to destroy you for this, but they’re distracted by other things.” Well, they don’t want it widely known. It’s exactly right they don’t want this widely known.
The last thing they want is people to begin to think that something like this could be a factor, however small, in some of the things that don’t seem to be explicable, how do you explain this? Forty-five different tips and warnings, four officers not going in to try to catch the perp in the middle of the act, how do you explain any of this? Well, you can’t. Not rationally, so you ignore it. And you shift blame to the gun and the NRA and all of that.
David Clarke, the sheriff of Milwaukee, has a piece, Breitbart: “Democrats ‘Have Screwed this Country Up with Failed, Liberal Urban Policies’ — Sheriff David Clarke blamed the nation’s crippling cycle of poverty and the ‘myth’ of mass incarceration of black males on the Democrats and their ‘failed, liberal urban policies’ which he says have ‘screwed this country up.'”
This is from a panel at CPAC: “Breaking Bad: What it Takes to Rise Above Circumstances.” And you know, the reason the headline struck me, “Democrats ‘Have Screwed this Country Up with Failed, Liberal Urban Policies.'” Now, this whole article, which is a rehashing of the seminar at CPAC, is just one truth after another. And the reason it struck me is because here’s somebody actually fearlessly placing the blame where it really belongs and pointing out what needs to happen.
These people need to be defeated, not met with and not accommodated and not compromised with. They have to be defeated. The things they are doing are too destructive to the culture at large, and this episode is one of the greatest illustrations of what happens when these people end up prevailing, because everything that doesn’t make sense here, everything that just looks cockeyed is a result of some liberal policy or thinking in plain motion.
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