National organizations that represent rank-and-file police officers are unhappy with being stigmatized by Justice Department consent decrees that put local police departments under federal court jurisdiction. They’re hoping President Donald Trump and Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions will roll back some
National organizations that represent rank-and-file police officers are unhappy with being stigmatized by Justice Department consent decrees that put local police departments under federal court jurisdiction. They’re hoping President Donald Trump and Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions will roll back some consent decree provisions.
In the case of the 14 police consent decrees in force, this is easier said than done. The federal judges in charge of enforcing the decrees are not likely to give up their authority just because the Justice Department has changed management.
But under Sessions, who is expected to win Senate confirmation this week, the Justice Department is likely to be far less aggressive in policing police departments than it was under Barack Obama’s attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.
In a confirmation hearing Jan. 10, Sessions, a longtime GOP senator from Alabama, said Justice Department intervention punishes entire departments for acts of a handful of officers.
The National Fraternal Order of Police, which represents 330,000 U.S. officers, and the National Association of Police Organizations, see Trump as an ally. Police-community relationships are extraordinarily complicated, but if “law and order” is your mantra, it makes things appear to be simple.
In the St. Louis area, only the city of Ferguson is under a police consent decree, and it’s reportedly having trouble meeting some of its stipulations. Ferguson is one the smallest of the 24 cities with which the Obama Justice Department reached agreements; 10 of them have been concluded.
There’s disagreement about how effective the consent decrees are. An analysis done by The Washington Post and PBS “Frontline” in 2015 found mixed results. Of 10 cases where data were available, use-of-force incidents actually increased during or following consent decrees. In five other cities, such incidents decreased.
The first test for Sessions will come in Chicago, where a 13-month investigation found exhaustive evidence of systemic violations of civil rights by the police department, which has a powerful union. Trump has been focused on Chicago’s murder rate, not its police department. If his Justice Department won’t help reform Chicago’s police, there’s little chance the administration will help anywhere else.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
