Will Project 2025 Save San Diego Sheriff Martinez From Jail Deaths Disclosure?
Saturday’s front page of the local newspaper contained a story by investigative reporter Jeff MacDonald about the actions of San Diego Sheriff Kelly Martinez to deny access to records of internal investigations into deaths inside local jails. A law mandates their release by July 1, 2024. It’s being ignored.
Sunday’s front page detailed the stories behind the deaths of more than a dozen prisoners and the lawsuits resulting from what can only be described as deliberate neglect by Sheriffs.
What’s almost as shocking is the documentation of the failure to act by officials at the top, our county supervisors. The best the reporter could do was to get two of the five supervisors to make statements to the effect that these deaths were a bad thing. It’s almost as if our elected officials are being held hostage… which they are.
Local accounts of malfeasance like those in the daily paper can and should be looked at in a national context. It’s not as if agencies throughout the nation aren’t mimicking this sort of behavior.
Despite losing in court decisions about releasing the documents, the Sheriff is now hiding behind an obviously faulty legislative interpretation and a judicial stay by the Ninth District Court of Appeals. Deflect, deny, and delay have kept the San Diego public from learning about law enforcement assessments of jails deaths.
When Sheriff Martinez ran for office, she promised to release the records in question, only to substitute vague summaries once elected. When the county lost their case in a court case involving a wrongful death claim, the case was abruptly settled and sealed. A consortium of media have sued, seeking access only to run into a legal team bound and determined to keep the documents under wraps.
Now, with a little luck, San Diego County’s law enforcers will emerge victorious should a Trump administration come into power. In the meantime, the elected sheriff is defying a legislative edict sponsored by State Senator Toni Atkins that was endorsed by the California Attorney General and signed by the Governor.
It’s not all that hard to speculate about what those documents will reveal, namely that law enforcement officers take actions (or fail to) justified by the belief they are above the law.
Sound familiar? Hint: a broad interpretation of executive authority crafted to impact primarily the 45th president of the USA.
For many years in many places law enforcers have hidden behind the badge when it comes to equal enforcement. When backed into a corner (as our city police were amid accusations of rape), they’ll promise changes, which are then watered down or ignored.
The promise of equality under the law is now being interpreted as what ought to be rather than a right, by a political force bent on creating what Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban calls an illiberal democracy. Crucial to maintaining this sort of governance are complicit enforcers given immunity from recourse when their actions become extreme.
This is the antithesis of what the founding fathers intended. Via the Brennan Center’s History of Mass Incarceration:
The Founders, rebelling against a British legal system that vested all power in the Crown, wanted a justice system that guarded against government abuse. Four of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution protect the rights of the accused or convicted. This was a statement of priorities — and the world noticed.
The presently constituted concept of incarceration as retribution often lacks a public safety rationale, disproportionately affects minorities, and inflicts overly harsh sentences, not to mention its failures (not all) in rehabilitation. Jail deaths in San Diego happen because prisoners are seen as less than human, even when they are suffering from illness and abuse.
It’s that “otherizing” that is at the heart of ghastly injustices perpetrated in the name of justice.
That brings us to Project 2025, a 900 page effort providing a blueprint for a second Trump administration. Enemies and “others,” real and imagined, are headed for the slammer in this document.
This blueprint includes a little shop of horrors list of policy actions with the aim of implementing an agenda tailored to the projected Republican candidate’s articulated wishes come true. The task force that worked on the part advocating replacing Federal employees with Trump loyalists is already accepting resumes.
Checks and balances nominally existing in law enforcement would be transformed to a new standard, namely the wishes of the executive. The promise of an orderly society absent moral challenges is supposed to be more valuable than the well-documented historical abuses of power via absolutist unitary executive power.
Despite the media focus on President Biden’s age, word of the intentions of Project 2025 has oozed into public consciousness, and people aren’t liking what they’re seeing. The GOP candidate for president has claimed via social media that he doesn’t even know the people behind Project 2025.
Former prosecutor turned never-Trumper Ron Filipkowski responded:
Trump doesn’t know the people behind Project 2025 the same way he didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein.
(FYI–The pictures circulating on the internet purporting to show the former president cavorting with young-looking women are AI generated fakes.)
The coalition of more than 100 Trumpist organizations contributing talent and content to this dastardly plan of action is functioning with a sense of urgency driven by changing economics, social, and political forces.
Should they win in November 2024, their agendas will take on a permanence not limited to the rantings of an elderly symbol of wealth and privilege. What they are inferring –in utterances at the margins of polite society– is a rerun of the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
I was credited on January 25, 2021 with the term “If Trump’s coup attempt goes unpunished, it will be considered a training exercise.” The truth of that statement still stands.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless ― if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, said on a conservative media outlet called Real America's Voice.
So, in addition –regardless of candidate– to voting on salvation for the soul of democracy come November, good people of the nation will need to stand firm in support of the rule of law.
There’s a reason beyond the obvious excuse (ongoing litigation/conflict of interest) why our County Supervisors have not brought the hammer down on the leadership of the law enforcement agencies they fund. It’s the same reason San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria spends time genuflecting before the SDPD.
It’s the threat of using their political power to degrade and undermine local governance. Deference to law enforcement authority is baked in at every level of our society, lest the forces of disorder theoretically threaten the economic and social order. Chaos, as promised by enforcers, will be accentuated by the finely tuned copaganda system, where reporters are tamed by dependence on sources as the sole originators of facts.
The collapse of order is mostly a hollow threat. Police strikes and lack of vigor in enforcement are notorious for their lack of impact on the overall crime rate.
Objectively-measured cops are little more than social street cleaners. They don’t solve many crimes even as they maintain the flow of the disadvantaged into the carceral/industrial system’s facilities. People don’t realize the impact of the facilities and personnel involved in imprisonment; it’s the flip side of the nation’s biggest social welfare program, namely the military.
I doubt any administration, local or national, has an interest in changing this aspect of the social order. People need symbols of authority to feel security, and Councilman Stephen Whitburn certainly isn’t up for the job.
What we need is an understanding of the levers of power in our political system going beyond elected officials. Learning and sharing about the agenda put forth by Project 2025 and its implications is a good place to start.