Trump Administration Hijacks Police Grants to Leverage Local Police For Its Authoritarian Ends Subscribe to the Free Future Newsletter Free Future home The Trump Administration has a nightmarishly authoritarian vision of what law enforcement should look like. In Memphis, for example, thousands of federal, state, and local law enforcement agents have invaded the city’s streets this year at the invitation of Tennessee’s Trump-supporting governor. Working as part of a 31-agency task force, they have carried out aggressive patrols, mass traffic stops, and large-scale immigration arrests, terrorizing local communities. Agents have engaged in such behaviors as tackling and arresting people for exercising their constitutional right to film the police, swerving at observers with their vehicles, following and photographing them, and otherwise intimidating them (All this is detailed in a lawsuit filed by my ACLU colleagues and in dismaying first-hand accounts of this behavior by victims.) This is a model that the Trump Administration would apparently like to spread to other cities, especially communities of color: flooding neighborhoods with aggressive, repressive, and frequently lawless agents and officers, blanketing communities with surveillance, and generally seeking to turn state and local police agencies into instruments of Trump’s federal government — its ideological obsessions, racism, and approach of loyalty over law. Last week, the Justice Department announced a “Model Cities Initiative” — a nearly $300 million grants program that “leverages technology, data, and partnerships to address drivers of crime” and “will provide substantial, targeted funding to select cities to realize this vision.” The money would be concentrated in 2-4 hand-picked cities to, in the DOJ’s ominous words, “transform public safety.” Presumably as a “model” to eventually spread further. It would be more accurately labeled "nightmare cities." A DOJ information sheet on the program starts with an outright falsehood: “In cities across America, violent crime and