President Trump is quickly delivering his campaign promise to help make policing great again. He already signed an executive order overturning the mild police reforms that they Biden Administration had implemented. Yesterday he also pardoned two Washington DC officers who had been convicted of second-degree murder, conspiracy to obstruct, and obstruction of justice. Details from CNN:
President Donald Trump has issued a “full and unconditional pardon” to Washington, DC, police lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky and officer Terence Sutton for their roles in the death of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, a case that drew protests on the heels of the murder of George Floyd.
In October 2020, Sutton and Zabavsky of the Metropolitan Police Department spotted Hylton-Brown driving a moped helmetless and pursued him at high speeds until he was eventually struck and killed by an uninvolved motorist.
As Hylton-Brown lay dying in the street, the officers covered up the incident, according to investigators, turning off their body cameras, tampering with the scene and misleading their commanding officers about the nature of the incident.
Sutton was found guilty of second-degree murder, conspiracy to obstruct, and obstruction of justice and sentenced to 66 months in prison. The same jury found Zabavsky guilty of conspiracy to obstruct and obstruction of justice and he faced 48 months behind bars.
The DC Police Union had sought a pardon from the Trump White House for the two officers, who had been out on bail pending appeal of their case, and lawyers for the officers had been actively pursuing clemency from the administration, as well.
In talking about the pardon, Trump had this to say:
“In fact, I’m going to be letting two officers from Washington police DC, I believe they’re from DC, but I just approved it,” Trump said. “They were arrested, put in jail for five years, because they went after an illegal, and I guess something happened where something went wrong and they arrested the two officers and put them in jail for going after a criminal. A rough criminal, by the way. And I’m actually releasing… no I’m the friend, I am the friend of police more than any president who’s ever been in this office.”
A few things to note:
First, high-speed chases have long been identified as one of the most common sources of injury for both officers, suspects, and pedestrians. They also have a long history of escalating minor traffic violations (as in this case).
Second, police reformers and police critics (including some who comment here) regularly point out how rare it is to successfully prosecute police officers for these types of crimes. Generally speaking police are given significant amounts of latitude by juries (judges and prosecutors).
Third, we should expect the Trump administration’s support for police, including those who clearly violated their oaths and abused their power, to increase over the next four years. Beyond campaign promises to help police to more aggressively go after “bad guys” to plans to integrate them into Federal Immigration enforcement, we are most likely entering into a period of a significant expansion of policing power at both the Federal and local levels. I will not be surprised if Trump ultimately commutes or pardons the officers who killed George Floyd. After all, in the President’s own words: “I’m the friend, I am the friend of police more than any president who’s ever been in this office.”
As always, I am the first to acknowledge that neither side of the aisle is anywhere near as proactive on police reform as I (and other people invested in criminal legal system reform) would like. At the same time, its in actions like the ones I call out above we see how great the gulf is. Democrats are not paragons of reform, but in comparison to both the first and now the second Trump administration, they are significantly better.
That demonstrates how empty and nihilistic “whataboutism” ultimately is. Or, if that black-and-white lens is going to be how someone chooses to see the world, then it should be applied to oneself as well. President Trump, through campaign promises and his previous actions as the head of Federal Law enforcement, made it clear that by voting for him, you are knowingly voting for expanded police and prosecutorial powers.
You might not like those specific policy decisions, but you still (thanks to our political system’s structure) voted for them. And for any other policies you do like (perhaps taxing American consumers via tariffs or removing support from Ukraine). And yes, it sucks to have to acknowledge that–trust me I’m happy to talk about all the Biden and Obama-era policies that I didn’t like (I’ve even written about some of them here). And that doesn’t mean that I can pretend I didn’t also accept that by voting for those individuals (or any other candidate), I was voting for announced policy preferences I didn’t like along with the policy preferences I like.
I expect that there will be a lot of “well I didn’t vote for that” in the weeks and months to come. So long as whatever “that” is was something that Candidate Trump talked about during the campaign or did during his first administration, then the reality is yes, you did in fact vote for that. As the tag-line from the fictitious (definitely not real life) film Traffic reminds us: no one gets away clean.
Note on nuance: I think there are cases where someone can honestly say, “I didn’t vote for that.” Those should be restricted to cases where a President (or any other politician) reverses course. Likewise, I think it’s fair to say most people who voted for George Santos were not intentionally voting in support of campaign fraud and serial fabulism. These cases tend to be few and far between.
There probably is a gray area, but I think this is a case where we should be careful about immediately going there. For example, I can see saying, “Well, I didn’t vote for Joe Biden giving blanket preemptive pardons to folks, especially his family.” I want to be able to say that. However, even though those pardons were not campaign promises, I’m not convinced that’s a true statement.
