Perilous ‘Consent’

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday rightly expressed “grave concerns” about the Team Obama-negotiated consent decree covering policing in Baltimore.

Sessions doesn’t want public and police-officer safety compromised. His new policy simply lists key issues that any decree involving cops should weigh: safety and protection of the public; officer safety and morale; protection and respect of civil rights; respect for local control; the use of timely, reliable crime statistics and orderly recruitment and training of officers.

Consent decrees, the AG warns, shouldn’t ignore any of these issues by overstressing a single one of them.

As it negotiated the Baltimore decree, the Obama Justice Department was overwhelmingly focused on a supposed national epidemic of police abuse. But will the decree make sense if the public starts worrying more about other issues?

In a filing in the Baltimore case, Justice notes that the city has “made progress toward reform on its own” and asked the court to “take these changes into account where appropriate to ensure future compliance while protecting public safety.”

As Sessions notes, violent crime in Baltimore is up 22 percent in the last year. Federal overseers, legally bound to focus overwhelmingly on preventing police misconduct, may make it tragically hard for the city PD to save lives.

Baltimore’s elected leaders, and the police brass who answer to them, are clearly committed to reforms that improve community relations while protecting the work of good cops. And if the city’s majority-black voters don’t see improvement, they can elect new leadership.

But if those voters decide that unwise “reforms” are putting them at risk, the consent decree could lock in those policies anyway.

On Thursday, a federal district judge waved off Sessions’ concerns in OK’ing the Baltimore decree. The city’s residents may come to regret that.