Consent decrees change policing. Do reforms last?
Proponents and critics agree they can be onerous
As demonstrations over police brutality rocked the country in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, Newark, N.J., was held up as a model of police reform, a department so transformed by federal intervention that its officers had not fired a shot that year.
The department had revamped its disciplinary process, established New Jersey’s first civilian complaint review board, and kept the peace during local protests even as police in other cities clashed violently with demonstrators.
Then, just minutes into 2021, the streak of no shots fired was broken. A Newark detective responding to reports of gunfire shot and killed an unarmed Black man.
Amid the swirl of questions and demonstrations surrounding the shooting, there was one thing everyone involved knew: The federal government was watching. Within weeks, the department’s body cameras policy was amended to include them for plainclothes officers like the detective in the shooting.
Oversight of local law enforcement agencies in the form of consent decrees — legally binding, court-enforced agreements — is the federal government’s marquee method for overhauling the nation’s most troubled police departments, often after high-profile incidents of police brutality.
On Friday, the Justice Department released the findings of its investigation of police abuses in Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered on the street by a veteran officer. With the withering 89-page report, the department has taken the first step toward negotiating a consent decree with Minneapolis, which would join a host of cities whose police forces are already operating under federal supervision.
Ferguson, Mo., the city where Michael Brown was killed by the police in 2014, has a consent decree. So do Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark, New Orleans, and several other cities.
In Minneapolis, police face the prospect of working under parallel consent decrees, one with the state that was agreed to earlier this year and one with the US Justice Department.
Critics and proponents acknowledge that consent decrees can be onerous. They can include hundreds of requirements, cost cities millions of dollars, and last so long that residents forget what success was supposed to look like.
Still, the consent decree is almost always the government’s most potent tool for reforming law enforcement agencies. By and large, experts say, consent decrees work, at least for as long as the oversight is in effect. They have a track record of reducing officers’ use of force and the number of complaints and lawsuits against them.
How enduring their impact will be is harder to judge since many of the consent decrees of the past decade are still in force. Consent decrees last until a judge is satisfied that a city has met the requirements. In recent months, the Justice Department has filed motions saying that Seattle, whose consent decree was put in place in 2012, is in compliance and that Albuquerque, N.M., where a decree went into effect in 2015, is close.
The Department of Justice report on Minneapolis echoes those issued in other cities: flush with statistics and details intended to underline the gravity of the findings and ensure cooperation. In Baltimore, the Justice Department said, 91 percent of those arrested on discretionary offenses such as trespassing were Black. In Ferguson, it said, officers had given a Black man sitting in his parked car a seatbelt violation.
After the report, the next step is negotiating the remedies that will be part of the eventual decree. Louisville, Ky., where Breonna Taylor died in a botched police raid in March 2020, is currently in the negotiating phase.
A key goal is transparency, and the decrees often require departments to collect better data and share it. Yet, it can be woefully difficult for the average citizen to check whether police are shooting and killing fewer people, fielding fewer complaints, or turning on their body cameras when they are supposed to. Those who try may be faced with hundred of pages of bone-dry quarterly reports or mystifying color-coded graphics.
After the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, Baltimore entered one of the most complex and comprehensive consent decrees ever written, weighing in at 227 pages. The department now reports that it is on track to comply with 86 percent of the decree, and touts an 82 percent reduction in police shootings from 2021-22.
Because consent decrees seek to correct systemic problems, they often take a soup-to-nuts approach, from rewriting policies on when officers can use force to revamping everything from internal affairs investigations to cadet training. But what some view as necessary, others say is overwhelming.
“It’s kind of like the old saying, when everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority,” said Jason Johnson, who was a deputy police chief in Baltimore overseeing compliance with the city’s consent decree.
In a recent column, he warned Louisville to bargain carefully. “When you lay out this massive consent decree, honestly, it’s like the department just stepped into a bucket of concrete.”