Press Release from the National Center for Public Policy Research:

Los Angeles, CA /Washington, D.C. – Project 21’s Joe R. Hicks has reviewed just-released U.S. Department of Justice report, “Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department,” investigating the police department of the city of Baltimore, and found it wanting.

“After wading through 163 pages of tedious government-speak, it turns out the Department of Justice’s indictment of the Baltimore police department rests on the controversial liberal/leftist theory of ‘disparate impact,’ which argues that any practice or policy that results in a disproportionate impact on ‘protected groups’ is inherently racially biased. Apparently, too many black residents of Baltimore have been stopped, searched, arrested or jailed. What should that number be to satisfy Loretta Lynch, our nation’s unapologetically-ideological Attorney general? Crickets. In issuing this report, Barack Obama’s DOJ, now seemingly acts as the legal arm of the nation’s radical black activists,” says Joe R. Hicks, political commentator and Project 21 member.

“Combining classic leftist class/race theory, the report argues that there are ‘two Baltimores, one wealthy and largely white, the second impoverished and predominantly black’ to argue that deployment of scarce police resources to poor, violent, crime-ridden black neighborhoods is something that violates federal law. However, more accurate is the fact that little in the way of crime occurs in Baltimore’s ‘predominantly white’ areas, while crime, violence and homicide is at crisis levels in poor black parts of the city. Lynch unwittingly verifies this, saying in her report that ‘BPD made roughly 44 percent of its stops in two small, predominantly African-American districts’ containing only 11 percent of the city’s population.’ Without tackling the undergirding and important questions of why some of the predominantly poverty-stricken neighborhoods wallow in crime and dysfunction, the DOJ report insultingly indicts an entire police agency as an aggressive, out-of-control department that prays on the people it is sworn to protect and serve,” Hicks continued.

“Baltimore is the nation’s 21st largest city, with a population that is 63 percent black. The city has been under the control of the Democrat party since 1967, when the city last had a Republican mayor, Theodore McKeldin. Under Democrat rule, Baltimore has struggled with growing crime and violence, with 2015 being the most deadly year in the city’s history, with 344 homicides — nearly all young black men killed by other black youths. Despite the inference that Baltimore is a segregated center of racial intolerance, the city’s politics have been controlled largely by liberal black Democrats for decades. Its city council is predominantly black, its mayor is black and more than half of its police force is comprised of minorities and women and 54 percent of its command staff are from racial minorities. This is hardly Selma Alabama circa 1963,” Hicks added.

Hicks continued: “It is more than suspicious that this DOJ report is issued within weeks of Marilyn Mosby’s announcement that, as the state’s prosecutor, she was forced to drop all charges against six Baltimore police officers because she simply had no actual evidence of any wrongdoing. More evidence of a vindictive, politically-motivated Obama DOJ? I suggest that this is the case. The Justice Department’s report says ‘it looks forward to working… to create lasting reforms.’ I smell another federal consent decree that will federalize Baltimore’s struggling law enforcement officers, as has now happened in numerous cities like Ferguson, Missouri. This, on the heels of an unprecedented national war on cops — and cop-killing at levels the nation has not seen before.”

Joe R. Hicks is a member of the Project 21 black leadership network, is the vice president of Community Advocates, Inc., a privately-funded Los Angeles-based political think-tank.

For more than 35 years, Hicks has been an active and high-profile figure. Beginning in the turbulent 1960s and into the 1990s, Hicks’ views were aligned with what he describes as the “orthodoxy of left – liberalism.” By the mid-1990s, however, he began a lengthy re-examination process that resulted in dramatically-altered political views and positions. Today, his views often stand at odds with the beliefs with which he was long associated, and he now identifies himself as a political conservative.

Representing Project 21, he has been a guest on the Fox News Channel, CNN, NBC, Newsmax TV, SiriusXM satellite radio, USA Radio Network, Salem Broadcasting, Westwood One and other national television and radio networks, and his opinion articles and interviews have appeared in national and international print media such as the Washington Post andOrlando Sentinel. A former analyst and commentator for PJTV.com, he hosted “The Hicks File” and “The Minority Report” programs for the web-based media outlet. From 2005 to 2008, he also hosted the weekly “Joe Hicks Show” on KFI-AM in Los Angeles.

Prior to co-founding CAI, Hicks served as the executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission from 1997 to 2001. In the early 1990s, Hicks was executive director of the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — the civil rights group formed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hicks previously served as a member of the Board of Governors for the California State Bar as well as on the California Advisory Panel to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

In 2007, Hicks testified on behalf of Project 21 before the U.S. House of Representatives regarding proposed legislation to create a “special resource study of sites associated with the life of Cesar Estrada Chavez and the farm labor movement.” Hicks, who had worked with Chavez, noted that “labor leaders who lead non-UFW farm worker associations hotly dispute the notion that Chavez or the UFW ever represented their views and challenge what they see as ‘mythology’ surrounding Chavez.”

See Joe Hicks talk about the Black Lives Matter movement on the Fox News Channel’s The Kelly File here and, also on The Kelly File, the Baltimore riots linked to the Freddie Gray case here. Some of many other media interviews by Joe Hicks are available here.

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Project 21 members have been quoted, interviewed or published over 35,000 times since the program was created in 1992. It is sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research.  Contributions to the National Center are tax-deductible and greatly appreciated, and may be earmarked exclusively for the use of Project 21.