This isn’t done by local Law Enforcement:

The mother of the five-year-old girl who endured a vicious sex assault at the hands of Iraqi and Sudanese refugees in June said she feels her family is being treated like “criminals” by local authorities and the media. One June 2, she was outside with her daughter when she left for two or three minutes to take a quick bathroom break — and that’s all the time it took for the three perpetrators to grab the little girl, before dragging her into a nearby laundry room, stripping her naked, urinating on her clothes and in her mouth, and filming the attack until stopped by an elderly resident. But no one will allow her to read the police report or her own daughter’s medical records, she said.

Technically, I believe a citizen who files a report is supposed to be given a copy on request as part of the procedure.

Local Police will have rules and procedures, and beyond that, they will want to help the citizens they serve. Politicians can try to intervene, but there is not an established machinery there to facilitate overriding the department’s rules and procedures. If done extemporaneously, it will be a special case, and that means nobody can be sure it will work, and if it is uncovered, there can be hell to pay for violating established procedures.

There is one established piece of machinery to facilitate shutting down local LE procedures in this way, and that is the Federal Law Enforcement Investigation. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I do know once the Feds come in, Local LE can be tied in knots. I assume the Feds get a court order forcing secrecy, to slap on everyone who knows anything, and that is forcing the report to be kept secret. Either that or they already have blackmail on whoever they need to. Today you never know.

This is great when it is done to further a vital need of Law Enforcement, like protecting an informant in a vital investigation, but as things spiral out of control, the rules and procedures used by LE to enforce law and order give way to whatever appeases the amygdalae of those in power. Pretty soon any power a Law Enforcement officer has, is nothing more than a tool for the powerful to exploit.

It would be interesting to know if the feds shut this down based on some investigation-related reason, like the family being protected informants or assets in that building (ala Whitey Bulger), or if this was done through politicians exploiting the federal LE apparatus to quash any release of documents. Either way, it is one more sign of the decline.

Obama’s administration is trying to drive wedges between the citizens and the law enforcement community. It is tough to believe it is all happening by accident. When Trump takes control, he needs to step in and make sure cases like this are resolved to the satisfaction of the citizenry, and the Law Enforcement apparatus is returned to serving the interests of the citizenry rathe than the criminals.

I would make that job number one.