On his second day in office, President Trump’s burnished his pro-police bona fides – pardoning two wrongfully convicted D.C. cops and, critically, halting the Biden Justice Department’s legal assaults on local police agencies.
But if Trump officials don’t act fast and aggressively, career bureaucrats and Biden administration holdovers can still impose their radical anti-policing agenda for decades to come – through binding court settlements called “consent decrees.”
While the new policy memos from Trump’s DOJ outline a freeze on new litigation and investigations, they stopped short of undoing pending settlements.
And two major policing consent decrees cases are awaiting court approval – in Minneapolis and Louisville. If the new leadership at DOJ doesn’t act proactively to withdraw, these cities could suffer under the weight of the last administration’s anti-police agenda.
And that’s just what happened under the last Trump administration, during my tenure as deputy police commissioner for the Baltimore Police Department.
In 2017, before Trump’s attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, could be installed, Obama officials and career lawyers worked with city officials to rush through an ill-considered and heavy-handed agreement that sought to fix allegedly unconstitutional policing practices in Baltimore.
I know because I was the department’s lead consent decree negotiator. While negotiating the deal, it was apparent that the DOJ’s team had very little understanding of the “on the ground” realities of police work but a firm grasp on the policy agenda they sought to achieve.
The DOJ investigation, ongoing for over a year, resulted in negotiation of a consent decree which went into overdrive immediately following Trump’s 2016 win in a push to finalize the deal before the new administration took over.
Once confirmed, Attorney General Sessions tried to rescind the agreement that was signed before Trump took office but was not “entered” by the court until three months into the Trump administration. The presiding judge ruled that since the agreement was a contract between two parties (despite these settlements being initiated and dictated by the Justice Department), the new leadership at DOJ could not unilaterally withdraw.
By sneaking the deal in under the wire, the Obama administration managed to dictate local policing policies under Trump’s first term.
Despite assurances that the settlement’s timeline would be short and its objectives attainable, the Baltimore Police Department is now approaching its eighth year under federal court oversight – having met only five of the 17 objectives needed to exit the consent decree. The twelve remaining are the most onerous – likely requiring years and tens of millions of dollars to achieve.
Most consent decrees drag on for more than a decade. New Orleans (12 years), Albuquerque (10 years), and Seattle (13 years) long ago met the initial benchmarks of their agreements but the monitors keep moving the goalposts. The implementation and monitoring costs are staggering. Seattle spent at least $200 million over 10 years, Chicago’s will exceed $100 million, and Louisville plans to spend 5% of its annual police budget to comply.
That owes to the fact that the Biden and Obama DOJs didn’t limit their aims to the law or the constitution, admitting they wanted settlements that go “beyond the primary objective of eliminating constitutional violations in the specific law enforcement agency” to include areas “where federal action might help set a standard for reform.”
Instead of promoting constitutional and effective policing, these agreements are fixated on the “disparate impact” of law enforcement stops, searches, and arrests – whereby any disparity can only be explained by discrimination. They curtail use-of-force methods ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court, pile on paperwork, and scrutinize officers’ every move.
Surveys show that officer morale plummets under consent decrees. These burdens manifest in fewer cops patrolling the streets, making arrests, and investigating crimes. Many prefer to quit or retire.
Public safety is compromised. In the two years immediately following a consent decree’s imposition, violent crime spiked – up 27% in Seattle, 20% in New Orleans, and an additional 11% in already crime-plagued Baltimore.
From the point of view of residents in consent decree cities, the settlements are an abject failure. In Seattle, police have less legitimacy than before while concerns about social breakdown have risen dramatically. Baltimoreans say they are less likely to engage the police, feel unsafe, and believe the department is doing worse at serving the community. Young black and Hispanic men in Chicago are more hostile toward police post-reforms, and in Cleveland, “consent decree fatigue” has set in, with most agreeing the reforms aren’t effective.
But this record hasn’t deterred the Obama and Biden officials who, alongside the true believer career bureaucrats ensconced in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, are hoping to get their policing agenda through in overtime.
It is not enough to pause all investigations and new litigation and filings. The Trump Justice Department must preemptively end the Biden-era agreements before judges make the decisions for them.
Jason Johnson is the former deputy commissioner of police in Baltimore and the president of the pro-police nonprofit Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, which filed an amicus brief opposing the federal consent decree in Louisville, Kentucky.
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