No, not that kind of grass. Get a grip.  As happened in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has called for the federal cavalry to sweep into the city and right the pattern and practice of unconstitutional abuse and discrimination.  In Ferguson, the feds issues a damning report, and we kvelled over it.  Oh, the feds are the ginchiest. So fair. So wonderful. So trustworthy. So federally.

As some correctly note, the feds consist of more than one person, one division, one agency, and so the involvement of, say, the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights, where they ship all the people who believe in unicorns to keep them far away from the Office of Legal Counsel, there are voices more trustworthy than others within the humongous structure of Main Justice.

But still, what we’re seeing is an adorable belief that the federal government DoJ apparatus exists on a higher plane of trust than our local governments, and this gives rise to a phenomenon of generalized faith in them.  This translates into a belief that federal law enforcement is better than the nasty, brutish local thugs who kill black kids, and the feds have magical powers that allow them to do it better, wiser, more fairly and with the utmost integrity.  The locals suck, and so we invite the feds in because they are the epitome of the new professionalism.

So what’s wrong with that, you ask?  Glenn Reynolds does the quick and dirty survey:

To believe that a federalized approach to policing would be an improvement over the current system, you’d have to ignore an awful lot of misbehavior by federal law enforcement lately. There’s the scandal with the Secret Service and hookers just before Obama’s trip to Colombia. There’s the entirely separate scandal with the Drug Enforcement Agency and hookers (hookers paid for by Colombia drug lords, no less). There’s the fact that the Secret Service’s hooker-scandal investigator had to resign amid a scandal of his own. There’s the Secret Service’s alleged attempt to use a fraudulent warrant in an effort to search a house illegally. There are the federal agents charged with stealing Bitcoins during a criminal investigation, and, of course, the laughable inability of the entire Homeland Security apparatus to keep a postal worker’s gyrocopter away from the Capitol despite advance notice.

The FBI, meanwhile, used bogus forensic evidence to convict thousands based on the questionable, if not outright dishonest, say-so of its forensic lab, and, most significantly, didn’t admit the problem for years, letting many potentially innocent people rot in jail. In one case, a man, Santae Tribble, spent 28 years in prison after FBI analysts said that a single hair found at a crime scene was one of his, when in fact it came from a dog.

They’re not very good at keeping up with guns, either. An FBI agent’s sniper rifle was stolen from his car days before an Obama visit, and — right under the eyes of Congress — Capitol Police keep leaving their guns in bathrooms — three times this year, including once in House Speaker John Boehner’s private bathroom, where the gun was found by a visiting child. Then there’s the Capitol Police’s questionable shooting of Miriam Carey after she made a U-turn at a checkpoint in D.C.

And it goes on.  There are two phenomena at play here, I suspect.  The first is that the grass is always greener, that when we perceive “a fractured relationship between the police and the community,” we want to believe that the way they do it next door is better.  We do this because we don’t want to believe it’s the same. or worse. We do this because we have this Pollyanna-ish need to believe that the whole law enforcement biz isn’t swirling around the toilet bowl.  If that’s so, then we get all depressed, eat bon bons and get fatter than Liz Taylor.

The second phenomenon has a firmer basis in reality than wishful thinking.  The investigation of one entity by another, particularly where the two entities harbor a healthy skepticism toward each other, suggests a level of honest scrutiny that can’t be achieved by an entity investigating itself.  Self-assessment is notoriously unreliable, as we value our rationalizations more than our rationales.  It’s what keeps us from blowing our brains out.

To the extent we can, and should, embrace the notion that federal oversight of local police is a viable means of ascertaining abuse and discrimination, it’s because we believe that there is a sufficiently healthy tension between the two that prevents collusion or cover-up.  We believe that the feds, who can’t police themselves and can be every bit as dirty, nasty and brutish as the local cops, to magically take the high road when it comes to passing judgment on outside law enforcement agencies.  Note the use of the word “believe.”

Is this belief justified?  Is it founded in reason?  Well, when the feds come down on the locals as they did in Ferguson, our breasts swell with pride because of our wise choice in relying on the DoJ to clean up the mess.  And perhaps they did present a totally legitimate, totally fair assessment of the failings of local law enforcement and its support systems.  But we wouldn’t know, except for the fact that we applaud the outcome.

Yet, this extraordinary willingness to love the feds when they tell us what we want to hear, even while knowing that they’ve been secretly violating our privacy for decades and lying to us about it, can lead us to ruin.  As Reynolds tries to remind us, these aren’t so much the good guys and the bad guys, despite our compulsion to grossly oversimplify our world into binary choices.  They’re just another group with its own massive, entrenched problems with the singular benefit of having a sufficiently tense relationship that they will condemn local cops for doing what they do themselves.

No, federal law enforcement is not the solution to abuse and discrimination.  The grass isn’t actually greener. Those are just a different color of weed.  No, not that kind of weed. Get a grip.