Ex-Cons to Supervise Cops in Leftist California

Liberalism is a Mental Disorder

(World Net Daily)  -  In a new plateau in the PC agenda, a move critics are calling a “travesty,” the city of Oakland, California, is encouraging former convicts to apply for positions on the city’s new police oversight commission.

A notice posted on the city’s website advertising the open commission slots reads: “Must be an Oakland resident. Must be at least 18 years old. Formerly incarcerated individuals encouraged to apply.”

What’s more, the voter-approved measure that created the commission prohibits current and former Oakland police officers, as well as police union employees, from serving.

Jeff Roorda, a retired police officer and four-term Missouri state representative, said this move borders on insulting.

“It’s a travesty, but it’s not surprising in the era we’re living in,” he told WND. “Cops aren’t afraid of oversight, but is it really oversight when you’re putting the convicts that these guys are sworn to protect us against in charge of telling them what they’ve done right and wrong?”

Roorda, who wrote the book “The War on Police: How the Ferguson Effect is Making America Unsafe,” said Oakland’s decision is part of the war on police. He said anti-police bias is likely to be a problem for any former inmates appointed to the commission.

“That bias is quite different when you’re talking about cops analyzing the situations that other cops find themselves in versus looking at it through the eyes of a criminal, a convicted criminal,” the former officer said. “It’s one thing to have people providing oversight that can relate to the very difficult job that police officers do and understand the challenges they face, versus somebody tainted by the fact that they had to pay a price for their misdeeds.”

Veteran journalist and author Cheryl Chumley, who wrote the book “Police State USA,” nevertheless said Oakland’s effort to recruit ex-cons to oversee the police sounds like a bad idea.

“Former police need not apply – but former inmates should? Tell me that doesn’t reek of an agenda, and a misplaced one at that,” Chumley told WND. “Given the majority of inmates in America’s prison systems are black and minorities, you don’t have to be a prophet to predict where this is headed – right down a path of Black Lives Matter-type revenge on police.

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