How Trump can uncuff U.S. police
Despite the hue and cry from some, the election of Donald Trump as President will have a positive effect on policing and citizen safety in America. And it will not, in my opinion, decrease Americans’ civil rights.
I believe the No. 1 civil right is to be free from harm. Though broad historical trends remain positive, we’re in the midst of an increase in violent crime, and more Americans are now dying from drug overdoses than from automobile accidents.
With smart and aggressive local policing — encouraged by policies set by Washington, and by an example set by federal law enforcement — we can turn the tide.
For eight years, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice has waged a war on police. The focus has been on criminal justice reform instead of modeling intelligent strategies to push crime reduction.
The lead division in this war has been the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. It has instituted brutality and bias investigations into and forced consent decrees upon 16 cities, including Seattle, Portland, Ore., New Orleans, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Albuquerque, N.M.
At least 20 departments are either under consent decrees with the federal government or negotiating one at the present time.
These decrees require independent monitors to oversee compliance with these federal court orders. (Previous administrations have used consent decrees, but under their watch, most disputes with police had been settled through nonbinding memorandums of understanding.)
This effort hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves, but I believe it has corroded the initiative and independence of local law enforcement.
The federal monitors appointed are often close associates of Justice officials with significantly less experience and expertise than the chiefs and commissioners they are overseeing. The process becomes a huge burden on city or county budgets, as taxpayers are forced to pay millions of dollars to monitors who have no time limit or specific benchmarks to achieve. An estimate from The Washington Post and “Frontline” estimated the total cost at upwards of $600 million.
The monitors’ mission is to advise the courts that the departments are in compliance with the court order. This subjective measure is solely at the discretion of the monitor, and the result is no incentive for them to report success.
The Obama administration has proudly trumpeted that they increased what are known as patterns-and-practices investigations of police departments by more than 50%. But there is no objective measure to demonstrate substantive change, and in many cases cities have suffered from exactly the types of incidents that the consent decree was designed to correct.
I am not suggesting that the use of monitors is per se a bad thing. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which authorized patterns-and-practices investigations of police departments, was intended to fix brutal and prejudiced departments.
There are some. The problem is overreach. In my opinion, the following must be done to stop it.
First, create experience qualifications for monitors. Do not select a police chief who has supervised a small department of 20 to monitor a department of thousands. There are excellent small department chiefs, but there are light years of difference in the challenges faced by each. Second, create time limits and benchmarks for every monitor to meet, and put in place incentives for the monitor to bring the department into compliance.
Third, require the Department of Justice to regularly require inperson reports from the monitors to assess their progress.
Fourth, as the Civil Rights Division drafts consent decrees in the future, they must decrease the administrative burden on the departments they investigate. I have seen firsthand the mountains of paper that are required by, and often go unread by, monitors.
The public has a right to professional police who carry out their duties without prejudice or excessive force. They also have a right to a Justice Department whose focus is on reducing crime and saving lives.