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Trump's Justice Department Stopped Investigating Police Systemic Abuses
In Janaury 2019, Smart Dissent wrote about former Senator and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions's last act as AG in which ue drastically limited the ability of federal law enforcement officials to use court-enforced agreements to overhaul local police departments accused of abuses and civil rights violations.
In a major last-minute act, Mr. Sessions signed a memorandum on Wednesday before Trump fired him sharply curtailing the use of so-called consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create a road map of changes for law enforcement and other institutions. ...before he left the job, the soon-to-be former attorney general....he initialed, in an illegible scrawl, a document formalizing the terms of what will be one of his abiding legacies: a Justice Department disengaged from its role in investigating and reforming police departments that repeatedly violate the civil rights of the people they’re sworn to protect.
The federal investigators have only examined a tiny fraction of the nation’s 18,000 police departments, but the reports created a body of literature that showed police departments’ troubles were often not because of a bad officer or two, but systemic. And the consent decrees forced them to change under the watchful eyes of a federal judge. A 2015 analysis by The Washington Post found that consent decrees helped police departments modernize and develop new policies...
Fast forward to June 2020:
Since Trump took office, the Justice Department has sharply curbed its use of investigations and consent decrees.... does not see police accountability as a high priority.... former Justice Department officials and other criminal justice experts see a connection between the vacuum of accountability at the highest levels of government and the ongoing police violence that has sent Americans cascading into the streets to protest.
For 20 years, investigations from the US Department of Justice, and the consent decrees that followed, were key to federal efforts to bring more accountability to policing in the United States, especially during the Obama administration. But as the nation reckons again with racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is all but out of the business of systemic police reform.
The effect of the Trump-owned Justice Department, destroyed by Sessions and then Barr, is to purposely make the Justice Department much less effective in enforcing civil rights laws.
Sessions, expressed deep opposition to consent decrees, saying they took away too much local control.
William Barr, said he does not think a pattern-or-practice investigation is warranted in Minneapolis, even though former officials say it is exactly the kind of department they would have investigated under the previous administration.
“It means open season — we’re not going to be there policing what you do, and we think you’ve been hamstrung and overly restrained,” said Christy Lopez, the former deputy chief of the special litigation section in the department’s Civil Rights Division...
On the other hand, under a real President:
Police reform had been a DOJ priority during the Obama administration, and that work played a significant role in the federal response to the deaths of black men at the hands of police in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri.
During President Barack Obama’s eight years in office, the department opened 25 investigations in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans and entered 14 consent decrees. After the killing of Brown, the investigation was considered so important that Attorney General Eric Holder himself traveled to Ferguson and talked about his own experiences getting pulled over as a Black man.
Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ayanna Pressley are calling on the department to return to these efforts. “It’s time for the DOJ Civil Rights Division to get back into the business of civil rights,” Pressley said.
Sources:
http://smartdissent.com/article/jeff-sessions-last-act-attorney-general-end-efforts-stop-police