Throughout the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly vowed to “indemnify” police officers from accountability for acts of misconduct they commit on the job.
Despite being a convicted felon himself, repeated complaints about the conduct of federal and local police and his leading role in a deadly insurrection attempt that injured scores of law enforcement officers, Trump is still working to portray himself as supportive of law enforcement, often by vowing to permit some officers’ violent and unlawful behavior. During the campaign, for example, he called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation to eradicate crime “immediately.”
To that end, his Wednesday pardon of Metropolitan Police officers Terence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky didn’t garner the level of attention as Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons or even his pardon of convicted drug dealer Ross Ulbricht — but it’s arguably just as egregious and foreboding.
Trump granted clemency to Metropolitan Police Department Officer Terence Sutton, who was sentenced in September to more than five years in prison. He faced a District of Columbia charge of second-degree murder, and federal charges of conspiracy to obstruct and obstruction of justice in the October 2020 unauthorized pursuit that killed Karon Hylton-Brown, 20. Sutton was the first D.C. police officer to be convicted of murder for conduct while on duty. The same jury that found Sutton guilty also convicted Andrew Zabavsky, a lieutenant who supervised Sutton, of conspiracy to obstruct and obstruction of justice. Zabavsky was sentenced to four years in prison. He was not accused of the more serious charge of second-degree murder. Trump granted Zabavsky clemency.
As NBC News goes on to note, Trump claimed this deadly police chase involved the pursuit of an “illegal” immigrant, but Hylton’s mom says he is an American citizen. So Trump appears to have made a knee-jerk assumption about the victim’s citizenship to protect a convicted murderer and his accomplice.
The broader implications of these pardons seem dire. Trump has threatened to “take over” Washington, D.C., as president and run roughshod over local officials, based on dubious claims conservatives in Congress have used to portray Washington, D.C., as a den of crime due to local leadership’s policies.
The pardons of Sutton and Zabavsky come mere days after Trump selected a former advocate for violent Jan. 6 insurrectionists, activist Ed Martin, to serve as the U.S. attorney to Washington, D.C., which would give Martin legal authority to prosecute local and federal crimes in the district. The pardons also send a message to police in the nation’s capital that they can break the law and reasonably expect the president to come to their defense.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.