Don’t retreat on efforts to hold police accountable

In city after city where unarmed young black men have died at the hands of police, Justice Department investigations have invariably found systemic bias in law enforcement. These investigations, combined with smartphone videos that capture appalling encounters between cops and citizens, are providing the first halting steps toward change in many communities.

But in a turnabout that could halt these glimmers of progress, the nation’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is moving to roll back this critical Justice Department function.

In February, he suggested that the department’s interventions were undermining police effectiveness and said he would “try to pull back on this.” This month, he questioned the use of consent decrees — court-monitored agreements between Justice and police departments that often come out of investigations — when he sought to delay a decree in Baltimore. A federal judge signed it anyway. A potential decree for Chicago is in limbo.

Sessions, who subscribes to the idea that a few bad apples within police departments are causing the problems, questioned the merit of investigations in Chicago and Ferguson, Mo., declaring them “anecdotal” and not “scientifically based.” He acknowledged that he was relying on summaries and has “not read those reports.”

If he did read the reports, he’d discover a wealth of disturbing findings, often based on years of law enforcement statistics:

uIn Ferguson, a community that’s two-thirds black, 93% of arrests over a three-year period were of African Americans, a discrepancy that could not be explained by any difference in the rate at which people of different races violate the law. Just as telling: 85% of the city’s traffic stops involved blacks, according to a 2015 report.

uIn Chicago, a 13-month investigation found a poorly trained police force in which officers were too quick to turn to excessive and even deadly force, often without facing consequences. Police used force almost 10 times more often against blacks than against whites.

uIn Baltimore, during the five-and-a-half years studied, 91% of those arrested for “highly discretionary offenses” such as “failure to obey” or “trespassing ” were black in a city that is less than two-thirds black. In one case, Baltimore police supervisors ordered patrol officers to “make something up” when told there was no reason to clear a group of black men on a corner.

The consent decrees lay out procedures for ending bias and making law enforcement more effective, such as improving training, increasing diversity, and promoting officers who will not tolerate bias or use of excessive force. Important changes can include keeping clear statistics on police shootings and holding officers accountable for misconduct.

Police departments and other insular institutions are seldom capable of looking at their deepest problems. Sometimes, even in cities with African-American mayors or police chiefs, it takes an outsider with expertise and authority to change the culture.

Some jurisdictions balk at federal involvement, while other city officials have called for the Justice Department’s help. Former New Orleans police chief Ronal Serpas says the existence of consent decrees often makes cities willing to spend the money needed to improve their departments, money that wouldn’t be available otherwise.

While not every investigation or decree has resulted in improvement, many departments are better for the experience, including those in Camden, N.J., Cincinnati and Washington.

Sessions says his goal is less crime and safer communities, but that’s hard to achieve in places where relations between residents and police are poisoned.