All reform agreements between justice department and local police forces – including Ferguson and Baltimore – to be reexamined, attorney general says

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The US attorney general on Monday ordered a nationwide review of all reform agreements with local police departments, placing a key part of Barack Obama’s legacy on criminal justice in jeopardy.

Jeff Sessions signalled in a memo filed to a federal court that “consent decrees” such as those struck in recent years with troubled departments in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, could be scrapped or scaled down.

“It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” Sessions said in the memo.

Sessions said he had instructed senior officials to reexamine all formal agreements between the department of justice (DoJ) and police agencies – from training initiatives, to collaborative reform programs, to legal consent decrees – to ensure they fit his series of operating principles for his department.

These included: “The misdeeds of individual bad actors should not impugn or undermine the legitimate and honorable work that law enforcement officers and agencies perform in keeping American communities safe.”

The NAACP’s legal defense fund slammed the move, calling it “a blatant attempt by the justice department to abandon its obligations under federal civil rights law and the US constitution”.

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In a statement, the ACLU also took issue with the attorney general’s suggestion that abuse within police departments was attributable to “the misdeeds of individual bad actors”.

“There is no national census of police misconduct to support the DOJ’s notion that there are only a few bad actors in law enforcement. Indeed, DOJ’s own investigative reports over the past eight years document systemic unlawful policing practices of local law enforcement in cities across the country.”

Sessions, a hardline conservative who was previously a US senator for Alabama, has frequently accused the Obama administration of unfairly maligning all police because of the use of arguably excessive force by officers in a handful of high-profile lethal cases.

Sessions made clear during his confirmation hearings in Washington in January that he was prepared to weaken legal reform agreements in order to hand authority back to local police chiefs.

Consent decrees are court-enforced lists of reforms that are typically struck when justice department civil rights investigators discover a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional policing by a department. A total of 25 such investigations were opened under the Obama administration.

Sessions has repeatedly expressed unease about such agreements, saying he believes the federal government has too frequently interfered with local policing.

Federal officials are currently enforcing 19 agreements, according to a report released earlier this year. This includes several reached by the Obama administration with cities such as Cleveland; Newark, New Jersey; and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The new Sessions memo was filed to court in Maryland in the case of the justice department’s consent decree with police in Baltimore. Attorneys for the justice department asked the court for a 90-day pause so it could “review and assess” the plan.

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The agreement was reached following severe unrest in the city following the death in April 2015 of Freddie Gray, a 24-year-old black man who died from a broken neck sustained in the back of a Baltimore police van. Baltimore officers had faced a series of allegations of misconduct and brutality in previous years.

The consent decree with Ferguson grew out of the scathing findings of an inquiry prompted by unrest around the fatal police shooting of unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown in August 2014. It demands that the Missouri city overhaul its criminal justice system and refocus its policing on de-escalation and avoiding the use of force.

Changes to consent decrees would need to be proposed in court by justice department officials and approved by a federal judge. In a statement on Monday night, Catherine Pugh, Baltimore’s mayor, said: “We strongly oppose any delay in moving forward.” She said a delay “may have the effect of eroding the trust that we are working hard to establish”.

During the presidential campaign, Trump earned the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police union, and the move is likely to be popular among police officers.

“I think most rank and file police officers will welcome this news,” said Jim Bueermann, a former California police chief and the head of the Police Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on policing research. “I think most street cops believe that the federal government has not been fair to them and finds the consent decree process to be intrusive.”

Police chiefs, in contrast, sometimes welcome the role of the justice department, since court-mandated reforms can be a way of forcing city governments to pay for changes, Bueermann added.

With the future of Chicago’s consent decree in limbo, the Chicago police department has pledged to move ahead with reforms regardless of what role the federal government plays. But in a blunt open letter, Chicago’s outgoing US attorney said that city leaders could not be trusted to fulfilthe needed reforms, and the police department needed a consent decree.

Recent justice department investigations into policing in Chicago and Baltimore found evidence to support what many black residents of those cities already believed: that local police departments had engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional policing. The investigations found evidence of stark racial disparities in police enforcement, excessive force, and patterns of unjustified stops, searches and arrests.

In Baltimore, the investigation’s final report described: “Two Baltimores: one wealthy and largely white, the second impoverished and predominantly black. Community members living in the city’s wealthier and largely white neighbourhoods told us that officers tend to be respectful and responsive to their needs, while many individuals living in the city’s largely African-American communities informed us that officers tend to be disrespectful and do not respond promptly to their calls for service.”

Phillip Atiba Goff, a leading researcher on racial bias in policing, called Sessions’ move “a terrible blow” to efforts to build trust between police and communities. “Without the help of a federal consent decree, police executives often cannot effect the changes they know a department needs, changes designed to build trust with communities that are skeptical of their law enforcement.

“Ultimately, I fear that this new direction from DOJ will make communities less safe by making them less trusting – possibly setting us back years or more.”