Elected to the Senate in 1996, Jeff Sessions became known as a dogmatic outlier. As many Republicans called for increases in legal #immigration and clemency for the undocumented, Sessions gave fiery floor speeches denouncing those ideas. As Attorney General, Sessions believes today’s low #crime rates are a direct result of “proactive policing” and harsh sentences, and that dialing them back is causing crime to rise. Sessions has moved swiftly to unwind the Obama Justice Department’s policies. By turning the Department away from civil rights and toward harsh enforcement, Sessions embodies what many see as the institutional racism of the Trump Administration, writes TIME's national political correspondent, Molly Ball. He has taken the racially coded messages that served as dog whistles during the campaign and operationalized them into policy. Sessions contends that the policies he champions help minority communities by cleaning up their neighborhoods. “If you do the map of your city and you’ve got five times the murders in a minority neighborhood, do you just go away? Or do you prosecute the criminals who are committing the murders? That’s the fundamental answer. And the other thing is, you think the mothers who’ve got children, the older people who are afraid to walk to the grocery store—shouldn’t they be free just like they are in the elite part of town?” Sessions leaned over the plastic airplane table during his trip to Kentucky on March 15. “Whose side are you on?” he asked. “I’m on the victims’ side, and overwhelmingly the victims are minorities. The prosecution of certain minorities for murder, the victim is overwhelmingly another African American or Hispanic. It occurs within their own communities.” (Law-enforcement statistics show white criminals also tend to target white victims.) His eyes gleamed as he sat back. “We are protecting minority citizens,” he concluded. “The fundamental question is, Who rules the streets? The government, or the outlaws?” Read the full cover story on TIME.com. Photograph by @philipmontgomery for TIME

timeさん(@time)が投稿した動画 - 2018/03/30 01:25:00