Outlaw and Grifters

The con continues

Flipping through national news a name I haven’t seen for a long while popped up: Danielle Outlaw. Former Portland Chief of Police. She got promoted out of Oakland for a big cop job here in Portland by Ted Wheeler back in 2017. Wheeler and the NAACP convinced us that this big national search was needed to fix racism here in Portland. Chief Outlaw left us losers in Portland at the end of 2019 for a promotion to Philadelphia - LOL she sure dodged a bullet getting out of Portland right before the dust up of 2020 that could have tanked her career.

Looking on her Wikipedia page it says left Philadelphia in September 2023 for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Well apparently Philadelphia is now cleaning house, according to the New York Post:

Philadelphia’s police department fired its first diversity, equity and inclusion officer — just hours before a new commissioner and mayor took office promising to restore “lawfulness.”

Leslie Marant, who began her job in April 2022, was axed at a 10:30 a.m. meeting Tuesday in one of the final moves by then-acting Police Commissioner John Stanford

It is unclear exactly what led to the firing of Marant, who earned a base salary of $170,568, online records show. The department did not immediately respond to requests for more detail Thursday.

However, the DEI position will remain open and the department intends to launch a national search….

Marant, a former chief counsel to the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission with no prior law enforcement experience, was hired under former Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw.

One article cites Danielle Outlaw’s old official twitter account announcing her completely unqualified appointment to a completely meaningless position. And boy, judging by those twitter comments people were super unhappy with Outlaw’s performance in Philly. Apparently that the weekend prior there had been somewhere between 20 and 50 people injured in gang related shootings.

All around, Outlaw wasn’t particularly successful in Philadelphia, as the New York Post continues:

The city has been struggling with crime in recent months, as it saw more than 500 murders for two years in a row.

Homicide rates dropped 22% between 2022 and 2023, but violent crimes like robberies and aggravated assaults with guns remain above pre-pandemic levels, city crime statistics show.

More than 1,400 people also died from drug overdoses in 2022, an 11% increase from the previous recorded high the year before.

Hmph. I wonder how Ms. Outlaw was able to continue climbing the career ladder with such lackluster performance. For more details on her history and controversy in Philly see this article. It notes that rumors in January 2022 she was already trying to bail for NYC, and must not have made the cut during those interviews - (perhaps unrelated, but Keechant Sewell got a job in NYC in December 2021).

I’m not suggesting Outlaw is completely incompetent and unqualified - I’ve actually done a great deal of research into her past performance and ideas she’s propagated through groups like NOBLE. Her sort of “signature” policy at this point (given that she used it in Oakland, Portland, and Philly) is to create easier access to the police academy for local high school graduates, rather than the higher barrier of college education. IMHO, a mediocre idea is better than no idea, and plenty of former police chiefs had no idea what to do about anything. Just think about Mike Reese, or that guy who shot is buddy in the ass with a .22 while drunk out in the Alvord desert, or Sizer. That perv Foxworth. None of these people meaningfully contributed a legacy to our city. Outlaw’s legacy is that of a goofy last name. The last person to try some novel and innovative with the cops (and a goofy last name) was Chief Charles Moose, and that legacy is a can of worms for another time.

As for Ms. Marant, hopefully she’ll find another illustrious $170k/yr job that someone invents for her. It’s fascinating that the DEI movement is being attacked on all fronts these last couple weeks since that Harvard University gal got in hot water. But I think we’re long past even trying to understand what DEI is supposed to do, or fix. For example, why did Philly cops even need a DEI program? Was there a diversity issue for cops out there? One article notes:

For Black representation … about 20 percent of the population [is] Black, and a roughly equal percentage of law enforcement officers, according to the most recent census data.

…

In the Philadelphia metro area, Asian people make up about six percent of the population but only one percent of the police force; Latino people make up more than nine percent of the population but only seven percent of the police force.

Who is saying with a straight face that someone with “earned life experiences” “from a diverse community” means that a black woman will help recruit more Asian and Latino people?

Out in the City of Brotherly Love the new Chief of Police is spent his first day in office declaring a public emergency to “work with city department heads to develop a plan to help hire more police officers, reduce violent crime, quash quality-of-life offenses and “permanently shut down all pervasive open-air drug markets.”" What a novel idea.

Happy new year!