Commission seeks police oversight
Civil rights group wants Justice Department to back consent decrees
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is calling on the Justice Department to “return to vigorous enforcement of constitutional policing” through the use of binding police reform agreements like the one in place in Baltimore.
The recommendation is one of several found in a 221-page report on policing that the independent watchdog group released Thursday.
It comes after outgoing Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a terse memorandum dramatically reducing the ability of federal law enforcement officials to use such courtenforced consent decrees to challenge unconstitutional policing practices in local communities nationwide.
The commission report, titled “Police Use of Force: An Examination of Modern Policing Practices,” takes a deep look at police shootings and other uses of force — including against young black men — that have led to protests and unrest in Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and other cities across the country in recent years.
It offers recommendations for how the federal government could address such incidents and prevent them from happening in the future. Among them: signing consent decrees, increasing training for officers, increasing grant funding for reform efforts, and improving federal data collection on such incidents by requiring local jurisdictions to submit data before they can receive federal funding.
In a letter addressed to President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, commission chair Catherine E. Lhamon wrote that a majority of the eight-member panel agreed that such reforms will help “stem the tide of perceived conflict between police officers and their communities” and “recommit this nation to the principles of fairness and equal treatment, including at the hands of police, that are core to democracy.”
The White House referred all questions about the report to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.
In an interview, Lhamon said the report was the result of four years of research and analysis by the commission, which unanimously voted in December 2014 to investigate police uses of force.
She said its release so soon after Sessions’ memo was “coincidental,” but also “timely.” She said she hopes it provides a compelling counterpoint to the memo, which she called “incredibly harmful.”
The Trump administration has castigated consent decrees as expensive and undemocratic overreaches that remove the power to make policing and budgetary decisions from locally-elected officials.
Sessions tried to stop the Baltimore consent decree, which was agreed to in the waning days of the Obama administration, by suggesting it would make Baltimore less safe. However, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar, overseeing the consent decree case in federal court, disagreed and entered the agreement anyway in April 2017.
The deal requires the Baltimore Police Department to make an array of reforms touching on everything from the use of force to officer training and supervision, interactions with minority communities and protesters, police protocols for patrols and stops, searches and seizures, police department staffing and the use of technology in the crime fight.
The deal was the result of a Justice Department investigation launched in Baltimore after Freddie Gray’s death from injuries suffered in police custody. Gray’s death led to unrest and rioting in April 2015.
The Justice Department investigation found widespread discriminatory and unconstitutional policing in the department going back decades, and it then negotiated with the city to produce the lengthy list of reform mandates in the consent decree. The work is ongoing.
Lhamon, a Maryland resident and Democrat appointed to the commission by President Barack Obama in 2016, said consent decrees have been shown to improve police departments and their constitutional treatment of citizens, and reduce use of force. And she criticized what she said was the Trump administration’s “unprecedented” and “deeply dangerous” abdication of its duty to oversee local police departments, including through the use of such agreements.
Lhamon said Sessions’ memo, making it far less likely that consent decrees will be struck with problematic police departments moving forward, ignores pleas for reforms from citizens and police officers across the country.
“The sad reality is that these … are daily concerns for too many Americans and too many police officers across the country, who every day are trying to find better ways to interact,” she said.
Lhamon said she and four other Democratappointed members of the commission voted to approve the language of the report and all of its findings and recommendations, while two Republican-appointed commissioners voted against the report and its findings.
Peter Kirsanow, appointed by retired House Speaker John Boehner, in his dissent, challenged the idea that Justice Department involvement in police affairs has been beneficial.