A sweeping new Department of Justice directive calling for the review of dozens of agreements between police departments and the federal government is raising alarms among police reform advocates around the country, with critics arguing that the Trump White House is dead-set on undoing hard-won criminal justice achievements. Late Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions released a memo calling on his two top deputies to “immediately review all Department activities” for adherence to the Trump administration’s law enforcement agenda. The areas Sessions highlighted for review included collaborative investigations and prosecutions, law enforcement grants, training, compliance reviews, and more. The attorney general’s two-page memo also took aim at “existing or contemplated consent decrees” between the federal government and local law enforcement agencies, setting the stage for an examination of numerous agreements and ongoing deliberations set in place by the Trump administration’s predecessors. Though it had been anticipated for months, Sessions’s call for a review of the Justice Department’s consent decrees was met with immediate criticism from civil liberties advocates, who view the binding legal agreements, overseen by independent monitors, as a vital tool for reforming abusive police practices and departments. “The memo is disappointing to say the least,” Jeffery Robinson, deputy legal director of the ACLU, told The Intercept. Dated March 31, Sessions’s memo was made public just hours before the DOJ asked a federal judge for a 90-day delay in consent decree proceedings focused on the Baltimore Police Department — a process that began following protests surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man who died in police custody. Baltimore’s police chief and mayor both pushed back on the DOJ request Monday, the Associated Press reported, arguing that a delay in the process would damage public trust. “We want to move forward,” Mayor Catherine Pugh told the AP. “We want to work with our police department. We believe there are reforms needed.”

A member of the Baltimore Police Department stands guard outside of the department’s Western District police station as men hold their hands up in protest during a march for Freddie Gray in Baltimore on April 22, 2015. Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP

If granted, the delay could pause an agreement between the BPD and federal attorneys announced in January, before the Trump administration came to office. The DOJ’s move in Baltimore, coupled with the release of the Sessions memo, has left many supporters of criminal justice reform worried that a new era is on the horizon, one in which the federal government takes a hands-off approach to reining in institutionalized police abuses on the local level. Under the Obama administration, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division opened 25 investigations into law enforcement agencies across the country, resulting in 14 consent decrees — a dramatic increase from the Bush years. With both Trump’s and Sessions’s records of resisting critical examinations of American policing — and with the release of the attorney general’s memo — advocates and legal experts are increasingly concerned that the new administration is hoping to unravel past agreements and make new police accountability investigations more difficult to launch. In the case of consent decrees that are already being enforced, Sessions would need buy-in from the judges who approved the agreements to enact changes — a difficult, though not insurmountable, task for government lawyers. In the case of cities where decrees have not yet been finalized, such as Baltimore, or cities where agreements to enter into decrees are still under discussion, such as Chicago, the Justice Department could have considerably more sway in impacting the outcome of the processes. In the case of future investigations, Sessions has already vowed to “pull back” on such inquiries. During her six years as deputy chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division, Christy E. Lopez led several of the Obama administration’s investigations into police departments and law enforcement agencies, including in Ferguson, Missouri, where she drafted a blistering and widely cited report on police and municipal court abuses and exploitation in St. Louis county. Now a law professor at Georgetown University, Lopez told The Intercept that Sessions’s long history of challenging the propriety of consent decrees makes his memo particularly concerning. “Given Sessions’s skepticism of consent decrees, and frankly this entire administration’s skepticism of using the federal government to protect people’s rights and do good in the world,” she argued, it’s fair to view the memo as a signal of the administration’s intent to “second guess every single consent decree out there.” Where that will lead, Lopez said, remains to be seen. “It doesn’t bode well for Chicago, obviously. It doesn’t bode well for Baltimore,” she explained. “What it means for the other decrees is really going to depend a lot on what judges do, whether they modify those decrees, and it’s going to depend on whether community groups intervene to try to enforce the decrees themselves, but it certainly signals that in the future, if a police department hasn’t done what it said it was going to do under consent decree and the monitor wants to call them on that, the DOJ is probably not going to have the monitor’s back.”

Police investigate the scene in Cornell Square Park on the Southside of Chicago, where 11 people were shot in September 2013. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images