Ladies and gentlemen, if you harbored the slightest doubt that the US Department of Justice must be gutted through-and-through like a rotten fish, that doubt will now be completely erased.

This is not a joke. This is real. Note the phrasing of the top headline.

From the DenverPost.com:

Denver Sheriff Department penalized for wrongful hiring practices

by Noelle Phillips

The sheriff’s department will pay a $10,000 fine and will have to sort through old applications to identify people who were eliminated from consideration because they were not U.S. citizens

The Denver Sheriff Department has run afoul of the U.S. Department of Justice because it made U.S. citizenship a job requirement for its deputies during a hiring spree in 2015 and early 2016.

The sheriff’s department will pay a $10,000 fine and will have to sort through old applications to identify people who were eliminated from consideration because they were not U.S. citizens, according to a news release from the justice department.

The department must reconsider those applicants for future jobs, the justice department said.

I repeat: this is no joke. The DOJ is saying that foreign nationals must be hired for law enforcement. This is one perfect example of a 1986 federal law that should be re-examined and then scrubbed from the books for any number of reasons. Further, because of Obama and Lynch, the DOJ decided not to simply warn but to outright fine a department that is already struggling financially. That money comes out of the pockets of local taxpayers and — as James Comey pointed out with regard to HRC — the Denver Sheriff had no intention to violate.

Hillary escapes, the Denver Sheriff’s Department does not. Oh, the irony.

First and foremost, these laws should be critically examined under the new Trump Administration if for no other reasons than those of common sense and national sovereignty. Foreign nationals cannot vote in federal elections and many state/local elections, cannot sit on a jury and logically should not hold sway in any fashion over true citizens of this nation by yielding the authority to detain, arrest and possibly take lives through the application of deadly force to non-citizens. I fail to grasp that logic.

Do we really want to continue with the precedent of, essentially, hiring mercenaries as did Rome? Hessians, anyone? Please note this irony as well: the federal government will not allow foreign nationals to be federal officers and work for DHS or USCIS.

Already law enforcement agencies across the nation cannot access the USCIS database:

Sec. 274A. [8 U.S.C. 1324a]  (F) Limited use for law enforcement purposes.-The system may not be used for law enforcement purposes, other than for enforcement of this Act or sections 1001, 1028, 1546, and 1621 of title 18, United States Code.

Many will make the argument that green card holders and those with work authorization are legal under terms and pay taxes — to the extent that illegals walking into a market to purchase a pack of chicken pay taxes. To that I firmly reply: at best, at very best, they should be — in an extremely generous sense — considered last.

The Obama DOJ fined Denver SO for two reasons only: 1) to be punitive, and 2) to make a statement, an example.

This is a perfect time to re-examine most every immigration law on the books and then try to streamline a broken system so that people may become citizens lawfully and in something of a timely fashion. And until they are ultimately sworn in, they should not reap the benefits or largesse of this nation.

Let me also, finally, state the horribly unstateable. Law enforcement finds itself in a terrible bind with regard to hiring these days, due to both the public stigma and the physical crosshairs placed on LE currently. I’ve seen and experienced this situation before personally, as one of my SME venues of expertise was training. Most everything is cyclical in law enforcement and hiring practices are no different.

Because of the desperate need for law enforcement officers across the nation, many agencies are sub rosa having to lower their hiring standards. Any time you relax hiring standards you create a contingent of persons who will yield sub-standard performance. Those persons then become your department’s training officers, its detectives, Sergeants, its Lieutenants, Captains and so on.

At times like these many departments, to its and the community’s detriment, tend to forget the three major axioms of Risk Management altogether: 1) Negligence In Hiring, 2) Negligence In Training, and 3) Negligence In Retention.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you got LAPD’s Rampart scandal in the 90s. Those situations and events were corrected by tightening standards, demanding excellence, and attracting the best candidates possible via “3 At 50” and other incentives.

I’ve seen this before.

I know what I’m talking about.

Because as I’ve always said: “you get the kind of law enforcement you deserve.”

Buck up, citizens.

BZ