Elected on the heels of global protests over police brutality, President Joe Biden promised broad reform to American policing.
He pledged to step up the use of the strongest tool for overhauling problem-plagued police departments, beginning sweeping civil rights investigations into a dozen police forces, including in Minneapolis; Trenton, New Jersey; and Louisville, Kentucky.
So far, those investigations have produced 551 pages of findings full of shocking examples of brutality, racial profiling, illegal arrests and impunity for officers who had committed misconduct.
But the Justice Department is running out of time to convert those reports into binding plans of action.
The Biden administration has produced only one final oversight agreement, in Louisville. President-elect Donald Trump is unlikely to pursue more.
During Trump’s first term, the Justice Department turned away from seeking new oversight agreements and pulled back from enforcing those already in place. On the 2024 presidential campaign trail, Trump repeatedly said that he wanted to give officers “immunity from prosecution, so they’re not prosecuted for doing their job.”
The lack of progress under Biden has frustrated residents of places like Minneapolis, where the Justice Department began an investigation after the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, but has not yet reached an agreement with the city on federal oversight.
“Here we are, 4 1/2 years after the torture and murder of George Floyd that ignited the longest worldwide protest ever,” said Stacey Gurian-Sherman, a founder of Minneapolis for a Better Police Contract, a police accountability group. She added, “The clock is ticking and we fear that come Jan. 20, President Trump will come in and pull the plug on Minneapolis.”
A spokesperson for Pam Bondi, Trump’s choice to lead the Justice Department, declined to comment on potential policy changes.
Gurian-Sherman blamed the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, and not the Justice Department, for the lack of an agreement. While some residents blame their city officials for being slow to negotiate, the Justice Department has taken longer than normal — in some cases more than two years — to complete investigations.
In a written statement, the Minneapolis city attorney, Kristyn Anderson, said the city would continue to “work in earnest” toward an agreement and that its commitment to improvement “will not change based on who is in the White House.”
Police reform under Biden
The White House pointed to a host of changes Biden ordered for federal law enforcement agencies.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is enforcing 15 court-ordered oversight agreements from previous administrations. Under Biden, it has also used lesser tools, such as a resolution with a sheriff’s department in Georgia where deputies stopped and searched a women’s lacrosse team from a historically Black university.
“Ensuring lawful, nondiscriminatory, transparent, and effective policing remains a top priority for the Justice Department,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who leads the Civil Rights Division, said in a written statement. “The Justice Department is steadfast in its commitment to using every tool available to ensure that the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans are protected.”
Federal police oversight was made possible by legislation passed after Los Angeles police officers were videotaped savagely beating a motorist, Rodney King, in 1991. But it was used infrequently until the Obama administration, which entered into 15 oversight agreements amid a growing outcry over police abuse.
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The agreements have often been propelled by a single high-profile event, like the 2020 death in Louisville of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old medical worker killed during the botched execution of a search warrant.
But the goal is to address systemic abuses. The agreements typically require departments to rewrite policies, beef up training and improve disciplinary procedures.
First, federal investigators determine whether a police department has a “pattern or practice” of constitutional violations and issue their findings. At that point, most jurisdictions sign a letter of intent to enter into an oversight agreement known as a consent decree, rather than face a federal civil rights lawsuit.
While consent decrees can last for years and be costly, many mayors and police chiefs have welcomed them. The agreements can give officials leverage to allocate funds and push police unions to renegotiate contract provisions that shield officers from accountability for misconduct.
Pending agreements
An impromptu memorial at the corner where Tyre Nichols was fatally beaten by police officers in Memphis, Jan. 29, 2023. (Brad J. Vest/The New York Times)
But Memphis, Tennessee, which was presented with the federal findings earlier this month, has so far declined to agree to a consent decree. In January 2023, police officers in Memphis pulled Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black FedEx worker, from his car during a traffic stop. They pepper-sprayed and beat him, and he died three days later.
In a letter to the Civil Rights Division, the city’s lawyer wrote, “From what we understand, consent decrees remain in place for an average of more than 10 years, with absolutely no controls to ensure timely completion or consideration for the financial impact to the affected community.”
The police officers involved in Nichols’ death were charged and their policing unit disbanded.
Phoenix, which was targeted for investigation in 2021 because of its high rate of fatal police shootings, has also not agreed to negotiate. Officials there say that the police department is working on its own self-improvement plan and that consent decrees make the overhaul process much more expensive.
“Our responsibility, speaking for both the police department and the city itself, is to change the minds of city residents who believe we cannot do this ourselves,” said City Council member Kevin Robinson, the head of the public safety and justice subcommittee and a former police official. “I think we can.”
But Jeremy Helfgot, a Phoenix resident who serves on several police-related committees including the chief’s community advisory board, said the same recommendations had been made by task forces and committees over and over.
“It’s been 10 years of spinning our wheels to essentially be back at the same place,” he said. “And now with Trump in office, any hope for DOJ intervention, I think, is going to evaporate.”
In Louisville, the city signed a letter of intent to enter an agreement. But after more than a year of negotiations, Mayor Craig Greenberg, a Democrat, appeared to be having second thoughts. After local police reform groups protested, he agreed this month to a consent decree.
Pros and cons
The Justice Department said that consent decrees have reduced officer use of force, improved officer safety and expanded the use of public safety measures that do not involve the police.
But critics say the agreements are inflexible, expensive and go beyond correcting constitutional violations.
“It’s just DOJ lawyers who have no experience running a police department,” said Jason Johnson, who was a deputy police commissioner in Baltimore while that city’s consent decree was being negotiated. “They don’t know anything about it other than what they think would work — that’s what consent decrees are.” Johnson now runs the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, which has been encouraging cities not to sign consent decrees.
Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department deputy chief, said that the agreements grew more comprehensive because many factors affect a department’s culture.
Lopez, who crafted police oversight agreements during the Obama administration and now teaches at Georgetown Law, said that departments like those in Memphis and Phoenix have had ample opportunity to make changes on their own.
“The whole theory behind these statutes is that when you have that kind of conduct, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible for a jurisdiction to voluntarily correct that,” she said.
Consent decrees are difficult to study because there are so few of them, and because each city’s politics and commitment to change varies. But studies have shown that the decrees may reduce both civilian deaths and the number of civil rights lawsuits that can result from misconduct.
“It’s the most effective tool because it’s an outside reform mechanism that can be used to instigate widespread, top-down change,” said Stephen Rushin, a law professor at Loyola University in Chicago who has studied consent decrees.
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He said that federal oversight can help ensure that the efforts outlast local leadership changes.
In Memphis, people like the Rev. Earle Fisher had asked the Justice Department for years to investigate the city’s police officers. But now, he worries that there will be no follow-through.
“Trump is on public record saying he wants to give full immunity to officers who do stuff like the officers did to Tyre Nichols,” said Fisher, who is Black. “And I cannot rule out what I perceive to be the increased likelihood of something like that happening to me. That’s what’s at stake.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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