Mother Jones: Trump gets police union's 100-day wish list of demands

NATHALIE Baptiste has written what may be the most frightening piece of American journalism since the apparent election of Donald Trump. Her reporting in Mother Jones looks at the payback that a major police union hopes to extract from the president-elect in the first 100 days of a Trump administration.

Baptiste writes: “The national Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which boasts more than 330,000 members and is the country's largest police union, announced in September that it would be backing Trump because he "understands and supports" its priorities. (The organization declined to make a formal endorsement in the 2012 presidential election but in 2008 backed John McCain.) Trump's rhetoric on safety and law and order seemed to align with the right-leaning union. ...

“The policy ideas ... involve aggressively dismantling the modest reforms suggested by the Obama administration in a 2015 plan called President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, such as increasing the use of body cameras nationwide and implementing a national database on police use of force. The FOP also wants Trump to bring back racial profiling in federal agencies by lifting or changing the 2003 ban put in place by the Bush administration. The union suggests he should cut off some or all federal aid to "sanctuary cities" and bring an end to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), using its database to deport the individuals who had been protected by being included in it.”

Like most wish lists, the FOP’s is aspirational well beyond reality, but that doesn’t put its objectives outside the realm of possibility. Not with the Congress we’re about to get next year. Baptiste’s story points to a big and influential fraternal organization at the tip of the spear in Trump’s erstwhile “law and order” domestic social agenda, and the tip of the iceberg vis-à-vis Trump’s authoritarian inclinations.

Read the rest of it here. When you do and you shudder in public, just tell your friends you got a chill. It'll be the truth.

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Image credits: Ferguson, Mo., police: AP/Jeff Roberson