Despite Holder’s comments to NBC News and Politico’s Mike Allen in late February, he evidently declined to follow through with a major push during his final two months as attorney general. The Justice Department did not respond to inquiries about exactly what kind of changes Holder wanted to see, and civil-rights experts said they had heard nothing about a behind-the-scenes effort to alter the federal standard. The president’s commission on policing didn’t take up the cause either, instead focusing their recommendations mostly on changes that police departments or the Obama administration can make on their own. Changing federal civil-rights law, however, requires an act of Congress, and there’s little evidence that Republican leaders intend to embrace that cause anytime soon—particularly when police unions are almost certain to oppose any changes making it easier to prosecute their members.

The question of how aggressively to press for changes to the civil-rights law—and how to address policing issues without them—now falls to Loretta Lynch, whose first week on the job coincided with protests and unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. Lynch acted quickly to launch an inquiry into whether the Baltimore Police Department had engaged in a “pattern and practice” of abuses of federal law, similar to federal probes that took place in Ferguson, Cleveland, and elsewhere. Schlanger said those investigations could be just as, if not more effective, than federal prosecutions of individual cops, since they are aimed at jumpstarting institutional reforms. Yet as Politico noted earlier this month, one of Lynch’s biggest challenges is that of resources—the relevant section of the Civil Rights Division has about 50 lawyers and cannot possibly take on every police department in the country. “We cannot litigate our way out of the problem,” the new attorney general warned in announcing the Baltimore investigation.

In recent years, the Justice Department also has been more aggressive in stepping in soon after a police-abuse incident or potential civil-rights violation occurs, even if the feds don’t ultimately prosecute. The more assertive approach, experts said, can maintain pressure on local prosecutors, who may otherwise be reluctant to bring charges against police departments with which they work on a regular basis. “It can be helpful to show a community you’ve left no stone unturned,” Schlanger said.

While the push for changing the federal standard of proof has fallen off the radar, attention has focused on increasing the use of police body cameras as a way to hold law enforcement accountable and stop the use of excessive force. Another achievable first step, Yeomans said, is mandating that police departments collect and report to the federal government data on deaths that occur in custody or as a result of an officer’s use of force. That recommendation did make it into the presidential commission’s report, and Obama noted it during an appearance Monday in Camden to highlight the city’s effective use of community policing. The protracted push to enact hate-crimes legislation got a boost, Yeomans noted, when the government first required local jurisdictions to collect and report data on incidences in which race, ethnicity, religion, and other factors played a role.

Could more data be the spark that leads to a change in the legal standard for prosecuting police abuse cases in federal court? Perhaps. “Nobody has ever gotten anywhere trying to move a new substitute standard. The question is whether this is the movement,” Yeomans said. “If it can grow and sustain some momentum, who knows? It’s not going to happen soon.”

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