Justice Dept. refocuses police reform program
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Friday it will roll back an Obama-era program that aimed to help police departments build community trust, often after racially charged encounters, and focus it instead on helping cities arrest violent criminals and dismantle gangs.
The move marked another shift away from Obama administration priorities and federal scrutiny of local law enforcement, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions believes can wrongly malign police departments and hurt officer morale. Police are a major constituency for the Trump administration as it espouses a law-and-order agenda.
The program known as “collaborative reform” allowed cities to voluntarily seek assistance from the Justice Department on issues such as use-offorce and de-escalating confrontations on the street. Federal officials would then conduct wholesale investigations of the police departments and make non-binding recommendations for how they could improve, periodically monitoring their progress.
Unlike the court-enforceable consent decrees that were a hallmark of the Obama administration’s efforts to overhaul troubled police agencies, the collaborative agreements run by the department’s Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, office were largely optional, and some cities had found them helpful in repairing frayed relationships with the community. But the Justice Department under Sessions determined the program had become adversarial toward police and counterproductive to helping cities drive down violence, which Sessions views as the department’s top mission.
Cities will be able to seek assistance from the COPS office in areas such as active shooter training, how to prevent gun violence and officers safety and wellness. The department said the office will still offer information on “best practices,” but it will no longer provide the kind of lengthy investigations, town hall meetings and public audits it did in the past.
Ron Davis, who ran the COPS office under Obama, said the old program was a way to help cities before their problems escalated to the point where they needed a costly court-appointed monitor to fix them. Other Justice Department grants provide training for things like mass shootings and fighting violence, he said.
“It wasn’t adversarial. It wasn’t an investigation. It was assistance,” he said.