Remembering Arne's Army
Here’s a follow-up on Thursday’s post about Chicago’s upcoming mayor’s race, and potential candidate, Arne Duncan.
Arne Duncan, who’s trying to rebrand himself as an expert on street violence, blames Mayor Lightfoot for the horrific increase in the number of shootings, especially during the pandemic. He’s running to capture the issue in a potentially crowded field that will likely include right-wing law-and-order candidates like Paul Vallas and F.O.P. Pres. John Catanzara.
Duncan’s alternative solution begins with a plan to reduce the number of city cops by several thousand and shift $400 million in city funds to his CRED gang-intervention program.
It should come as no surprise that he’s playing this one-note song while downplaying his disastrous failed school policies when he ran Chicago schools and later, the Department of Education (DOE). They included mass school closings, teacher firings, and overuse of standardized testing.
But here’s the thing. When Duncan was at the U.S. Dept. of Education, there was none of that defund-the-police or anti-violence rhetoric. Instead, Duncan equipped his own DOE police force with military-style assault weapons. He also issued search warrants and sent SWAT teams from the Inspector General to hunt down more than 100 late payers government loans.
In a particularly publicized case, heavily-armed SWAT teams went out purportedly hunting for the student loan defaulters. They mistakenly thought they found one out in Stockton, CA where they kicked in the door in the early morning hours to collect on the overdue loans and dragged Kenneth Wright out of his home, terrifying his small children. It was actually his estranged wife they were looking for.
Wright said the law enforcement agents -- who reportedly included 13 with the Education Department— told him that his wife was the focus of the investigation over financial aid fraud after earlier being told it involved student loan defaults.
Duncan’s office later denied that the SWAT team was after student-loan defaulters and told a local TV station to take down its video where a reporter interviewed the victim of the raid. The station complied.
Whatever they were after, the story shows that as Education Secretary, Duncan supported the militarization of police at the DOE.
Duncan’s successor, Betsy DeVos, also bought into the department’s gun culture. The difference is, DeVos preferred teachers packing guns in their classrooms. Duncan preferred to spend lots of ed dollars on expensive military hardware for his own DOE team.
After he left his post as Pres. Obama's education chief, Duncan became an advocate of gun control, to the point where, for a few days, he was urging Chicago parents to keep their children home from public schools until gun laws were passed. As you might expect, this suggestion fell on deaf ears.
There’s no telling how his positions may shift as election day approaches.
duncan was a neoliberal disaster for eduction and would be a further disaster as mayor. he's a thug.