Now He’s Back in Jail
By Nicholas Stix
[Warning! Both video boxes below will go on, as soon as the page opens. You need to go to them and stop them.]
Michael Baxton Sr. was convicted of felonies in 1982, and so when he wanted to become a police officer, he simply lied about them. Besides, most black folks have nothing against felon-cops—nobody’s perfect, right? And everyone’s got to eat, right? And everyone’s got a right to work for a living, right?
The ban on hiring convicted felons as lawmen is not a judgment call. It’s not something to be settled on a case-by-case basis. It’s an absolute criterion. People who oppose the ban simply do not believe in law enforcement; they believe in the rule of crime.
And the ban on hiring convicted felons is only a part of good administration. One must also refuse to hire applicants who have declared bankruptcy, or who have associates or immediate family members who are known criminals. (It is not necessary for the individuals to be convicted, either.)
A well-run department must not only require that an applicant pass a background check, but pass rigorous intellectual, psychological, and physical tests. And once an applicant is accepted to the academy, and once he graduates and becomes an officer, he must always be properly supervised, to ensure that he does not deviate from the “thin blue line.”
Blacks and their allies have always opposed the aforementioned standards. And as economist John Lott showed, hiring more black cops increases crime.
Most blacks do not believe in enforcing the law. The movement to bring in more black cops during the 1960s was not a cry for fairness, as it was often depicted. It was not a cry for more efficient crime-fighting, as it was often depicted. It was a cry for the rule of crime. Most blacks see control of police departments as a license to steal, and a weapon in their race war on whites.
When “King” Coleman Young was elected mayor of Detroit in 1971, he said that making the Detroit Police Department blacker would make it better.
Instead, he hired black felons right out of prison, and crime exploded, making Detroit the murder capital of the country in 1974. Dedicated, decorated, veteran white cops were run out of town, when they weren’t railroaded into prison, as Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers were.
Note that the Village of Alorton and City of East St. Louis, in Illinois, both of which hired Michael Baxton to be their police chief, are both 97 percent black. (East St. Louis may be the most violent city in the country.) Ninety-two percent black Highland Park, Michigan, hired LaNesha Jones, a violent, convicted criminal who had been fired by the Detroit PD, to be its deputy police chief.
The correlation between black-run police departments and corruption is off the charts, and correlation does mean causation in this case.
Time and again, we see that a black-run department is a corrupt, inefficient department. Are all black-run departments equally bad? Of course, not. Are all white departments towing the thin blue line. Of course, not. But the connection between blackness and corruption problem is a strong correlation, and in this case, correlation is causation.
Former East St. Louis police chief arrested
Former East St. Louis police chief Michael Baxton pleads guilty
3:22 AM, Jan 20, 2012 | 8 comments
Written by Kevin Held
East St. Louis, IL (KSDK) - NewsChannel 5 has learned that the former head of the East St. Louis Police Department pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday morning.
Michael Baxton Sr. stepped down as police chief Wednesday afternoon, citing personal reasons at the time. He pleaded guilty to felony charges of stealing evidence and making false statements to federal investigators.
Baxton, 49, posted bond later in the day and is awaiting sentencing, set for April 27.
In May 2011, Baxton was hired by the Village of Alorton to serve as the police chief. The previous Alorton police chief, Robert Cummings, pleaded guilty to unrelated federal tax crimes. Baxton served as Alorton police chief until October 14, 2011, when state authorities decertified Baxton as a police officer after discovering he had at one time received two felony convictions from 1982.
On November 17, 2011, a St. Clair County judge reinstated Baxton's law enforcement credentials. Shortly after being reinstated, Baxton was hired to be the next police chief of East St. Louis, a position her served in from November 30, 2011 to January 18, 2012.
Baxton resigned as part of his plea agreement to the charges against him.
Meanwhile, a federal investigation was underway into allegations of corruption within the Village of Alorton by various public officials.
In the months following Baxton's appointment as police chief, several officers in the Alorton Police Department complained to federal investigators that Baxton showed favorable treatment to arrestees who were family members or associates of certain Alorton residents or of Baxton himself. Officers further accused Baxton of failing to send evidence to the Illinois State Police crime lab for testing, or of stealing evidence fron the secured evidence room within the chief's office.
Federal agents arranged an undercover sting operation against Baxton. They abandoned a federally-owned covert vehicle and reported it stolen, registered to a fictitious Illinois business.
Baxton and another officer, working with the FBI in an undercover capacity, responded to the call of an abandoned vehicle. They found five Xbox 360 video game consoles inside the car. Baxton took four of the consoles and told the other officer to take the fifth one for himself.
Agents with the IRS and FBI interviewed Baxton on January 5. He denied ever taking anything while working as a police officer. At one point, Baxton blamed another officer for the theft, saying that officer took all the devices. When confronted with evidence that authorities knew he took the devices, Baxton apologized and assisted in recovering the four consoles he stole.
Baxton faces up to 10 years imprisonment, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release on the theft of government property charge. The crime of making a false statement to a federal law enforcement officer is punishable by up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release.
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