A few weeks back, Jonathan wrote about Bush being soft on crime, especially white-collar crimes. Following 9/11, GW restructured the FBI, tasking it with counter-terrorism efforts. Because the bureau was given no additional funds to handle the increased work-load, something had to go. Well, it turns out the FBI hasn’t just neglected bank fraud and ID theft, civil rights cases have been ignored as well. Seattle Post Intelligencer reports that there were “two-thirds fewer investigations targeting abusive police officers, cross-burners and other purveyors of hate from 2001 to 2005.” According to the FBI, it wasn’t just the budget crunch that lead to the decrease, but that they gave up on investigating these types of crime because only 10 percent of the cases referred to the Justice Department were prosecuted. As Jonathan noted, the DOJ was maybe too busy with “show trial terror prosecutions” or was it the politicization of the department that had them otherwise engaged?
