How many thousands of times have we been told by criminal justice "reformers" that we should rely on "data-driven" policy and "evidence-based" determinations?  And that troglodytes (like posters on this blog) instead rely on nativist emotion?

Largely, the insistence on data and evidence, which sounds unarguable in the abstract, is simply a dodge  --  a tactic of delay and evasion to make us doubt what we've been learning from one source after the next for months (for example, that the police have become cautious to the point of danger, or that the spike in murder is a nationwide problem).

Sometimes, though, the insistence on "data" simply means an insistence on scrubbed data.  Evidence adverse to the political agenda du jour (in Obama's case, whitewashing Jihad) literally gets blotted out.  Hence this story from the Minister of Information Attorney General:

The Department of Justice is scrubbing references of radical Islamic beliefs from the transcripts of calls Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen made to police during his massacre, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday.

A partial transcript of the conversations between authorities and Mateen, who killed 49 and wounded 53 in the June 12 attack at a Florida gay nightclub, is set to be released on Monday. But Lynch, who appeared on numerous Sunday talk shows, said the transcripts will not include Mateen's oath of loyalty to ISIS or any other religious justification for the attack.

"What we're not going to do is further proclaim this man's pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda," Lynch told NBC. "We are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance [to the Islamic State]."