Fort Worth groups call for consent decree on police
But option may not work for the city
FORT WORTH, Texas — Community leaders on Wednesday called on the Trump administration to open a civil rights investigation into the Fort Worth Police Department in the wake of a white officer’s fatal shooting of a black woman in her home, saying the goal should be a far-reaching police reform plan enforced by a federal judge.
But it’s unclear if that objective is realistic, given the disfavor, even hostility, the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump has shown toward such court-supervised plans, called consent decrees, which agency policymakers say too often tie the hands of officers while imposing burdensome costs.
Pastor Kyev Tatum, among those at a news conference in Fort Worth to make the request, said attempts to get the city to end the kind of abuses that contributed to the killing of Atatiana Jefferson on Saturday hadn’t worked. No mechanism exists to hold city officials accountable, he said.
“It’s time for somebody else to take control,” he said.
Tatum and others sent a letter to the Justice Department asking it to determine whether there has been “a continued pattern and practice of using excessive force” against minorities in Fort Worth.
Officer Aaron Dean, 34, resigned and was arrested Monday for firing a single bullet through a windowpane while investigating a neighbor’s report about the front door being open at Jefferson’s home.
“The only alternative to prevent future unlawful killings,” the coalition letter said, “is to place the city under a federal consent decree.”
The Department of Justice conducted civil rights investigations of nearly 70 police departments between 1994, when Congress authorized them, and the end of President Barack Obama’s administration. But the agency’s current policy, established by then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, pulled back on previous administrations’ embrace of long-lasting, in-depth federal investigations of police followed by reform plans supervised by federal judges.
Hours before he resigned as attorney general in November 2018, Sessions signed a memo guidance to staff that portrayed consent decrees as having been too sweeping, too open-ended and too much of a strain on city budgets. The guidance doesn’t explicitly rule out consent decrees, but sharply limits situations in which the Justice Department would pursue them.
Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department attorney, said, “I can’t say for sure (the Justice Department) won’t open an investigation against Fort Worth — but it seems unlikely.”
Communities bent on overhauling their police forces through court-monitored plans don’t necessarily have to involve the Justice Department.
Chicago, which has had a long reputation for police brutality against minorities, is a case in point.
After a more-than-yearlong investigation, a damning report released in the waning days of the Obama administration in January 2017 found that deep-rooted civil rights abuses permeated Chicago’s more-than-13,000-member force.
Over several months, then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration negotiated a draft plan with Trump’s Department of Justice that foresaw no court role.
That option may not be politically viable for Fort Worth, said Smith. Illinois’ attorney general, a Democrat, was sympathetic to the idea of a consent decree, but the GOP attorney general in Texas most likely would not be, he said.