POLICE GROUPS: SESSIONS WILL REPAIR ‘FROSTY’ RELATIONSHIP WITH FEDS

Law enforcement groups view Sessions as someone who will bring a “police-first” mentality to Justice that they say was absent during President Obama’s eight years in office.

In Sessions, they see a traditional law-and-order style enforcer who they believe will repair the relationship between the feds and local police that has grown frosty in the Obama administration.

Sessions is backed by key figures from within several prominent police groups, including the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the nation’s largest police union; the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association; the National Association of Police Organizations; and the National Sheriffs Association.

“We have about a 20-year relationship with Jeff Sessions from his time in the Senate on the Judiciary Committee and our members in Alabama who worked with him, both as state attorney general and a U.S. attorney, and the best way to sum it up is that we don’t have anything bad to say about Jeff Sessions,” FOP executive director Jim Pasco told The Hill.

“He has extraordinary insight into the demands and stresses of a police officer’s life and also has a real reverence for the rule of law. It sounds corny but it’s true, and that’s what our members pray for in a prosecutor.”

Obama’s attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, prioritized investigations into police practices, particularly in minority communities. That focus and growing nationwide attention to potential police abuses led to several high-profile Justice Department investigations into police departments in Cleveland, Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere.

Some law enforcement officials believe those investigations have produced onerous new restrictions and an intrusive level of oversight that they say has stripped the police of their ability to react instinctively to potentially dangerous encounters.

And they say public criticism and the intense focus from Obama’s White House and the Justice Department have undermined law enforcement authority at the local level by demonizing police.

Those tensions exploded into the open just months into the Obama administration in July 2009, when police Sgt. James Crowley, who is white, arrested black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home for “disorderly conduct” after responding to a call about an alleged break-in.

That incident sparked a national debate on race, which Obama inflamed after saying the police officer had “acted stupidly.”

The president later backed away from those remarks, saying that both men could have responded differently to calm the situation. Obama eventually held a “beer summit” with Crowley and Gates at the White House, but the incident badly damaged his standing in the eyes of the police groups.

Law enforcement officials are optimistic there will be fewer explosive incidents like that under a Sessions Justice Department.