Will the Justice Dept. bury police reforms?

been making national headlines. Stephon Clark, 22, was struck eight times by police in Sacramento, Calif. An autopsy report showed that most of those shots were to Clark’s back, which conflicts with the police account that he posed a threat to officers. The police said they thought he had a gun, but only a cellphone was found near his body.

And as angry residents protested that killing, officials in Baton Rouge, La., decided not to charge two police officers in the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling, 37, two years earlier. Sterling was shot by police while resisting arrest in a scuffle that was caught on video.

Few police officers ever face trial for shooting deaths. Many fewer are convicted. Juries understandably tend to give the benefit of their doubts to police, who risk their lives in a tough job. But among other benefits, federal consent decrees have dealt not only with the circumstances of individual cases but also with systemic problems.

In each of those cities subjected to Justice Department investigations and reform efforts, Justice found evidence of a “pattern or practice” of biased policing on a wider scale than any individual officer.

So far, the results of such federal interventions have been mixed. The Washington Post, which launched its own national database of police shootings in 2015, found last year that in five of the 10 police departments for which sufficient data were available, use of force by officers actually increased during and after the agreements. In five others it stayed the same or declined.

In most of the departments, the interventions dragged on for years beyond the original projections, pushing costs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Officer morale reportedly plummeted during the interventions and police-community relations did not always improve.

In short, federal consent decrees are far from a perfect remedy, but as an old saying goes, we should not let our pursuit of the perfect be an enemy of the good. Let’s not bury the improvements that we’ve made in police-community relations since the 1960s. Let’s make more.