Cities should not consent to federal takeover of their police departments, and should make moves to vacate the consent decrees when possible, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik tells Newsmax TV.
The United Nations in recent days backed the plan in an effort to combat complaints of discrimination among police department in the wake of the shooting deaths of black men, many of whom were not armed.
Kerik, appearing Thursday on "Newsmax Prime," told host J.D. Hayworth the U.N. should not equate the United States with truly problematic countries such as the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who is encouraging vigilante justice in that country's war on drugs.
"You have Syria, Iraq, Chad, the Sudan, they're coming into the United States, and they want to engage in the United States policing?" Kerik said. "They should go find something real to do and go do their job, because they don't really do their job."
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New York was under a consent decree when he took over as deputy commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the 1990s, Kerik said.
"That was a because the department wasn't doing its job, it wasn't living up to the state laws and federal laws and minimum standards," he said, "but over the five-and-a-half, six-year period under Giuliani, we vacated every one of those consent decrees."
Today, however, they are "popping up" in local municipalities all over the country, mostly in cities run by Democrats.
"If these police departments come into compliance with state law and federal law, they can vacate those consent decrees," he said. "And I would push them on the third topic, don't agree to them if you're not doing nothing wrong. The federal government, the Department of Justice comes in and says we're going to sue you if you don't agree to this, well, if you're not doing nothing wrong, I take that fight onto court."
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