Shortly after bringing a quiet, ignominious end to the Department of Justice's efforts to protect Americans from race discrimination at the ballot box, newly-minted attorney general Jeff Sessions continued living his best life on Tuesday, providing the the first glimpses of his agenda in a speech delivered to a meeting of state attorneys general. It's a bleak, reductive, and barbaric approach to law enforcement that will have profound consequences for people of color, and Sessions either doesn't understand this, or doesn't care to try.

The attorney general started with a scary-sounding premise, acknowledging that that although "crime rates in the United States remain near historic lows overall," he sees "clear warning signs—like the first gusts of wind before a summer storm—that this progress is now at risk." After citing to statistics that indicate a slight uptick in certain categories of violent crime, Sessions concluded as follows:

These numbers should trouble all of us. My worry is that this is not a “blip” or an anomaly, but the start of a dangerous new trend that could reverse the hard-won gains of the past four decades—gains that made America a safer and more prosperous place.

As someone who lived through that dark time in our history, and dealt with its consequences every day as a prosecutor, I can assure you: We do not want to go back to those days. We cannot risk giving up all we have achieved in our fight against crime.

So we need to act decisively at all levels—federal, state and local—to reverse this rise in violent crime and keep our citizens safe. This will be a top priority of the Department of Justice during my time as Attorney General.

It would be nice if, in 2017, the attorney general would use the resources at his disposal to offer a more convincing case for this prediction than his own reading of the tea leaves, especially when relying on that premise to justify a massive and expensive crackdown on violent crime. However, given the high bar Sessions has already set during his tenure, none of this is all that offensive. Sessions is the attorney general, and if violent crime is increasing, he's in charge of reversing this trend.

When Sessions began detailing his solutions to these problems, though, is when things quickly went to hell.