Recently in this thread the topic of federal involvement in local police departments came up, and there are some points I want to add.
The main way this is done at present is through federal oversight. And it didn’t just start with the Obama administration; it’s been going on much longer than that. Just to take one example (the article is from this past January):
U.S. District Judge William Orrick said during a hearing Wednesday that the police department still has a ways to go to meet court-ordered reform goals, reported the East Bay Times.
“Despite what I know have been the good-faith efforts and hard work of the chief and of the command staff, there still remain important areas of noncompliance, and some of them seem to have straightforward fixes and they need to be fixed in order to reach substantial compliance,” Orrick said. “I’m frankly disappointed they haven’t been as of yet.”
Orrick said he believes the police department needs to complete Internal Affairs and use-of-force investigations more quickly and make sure that officers consistently activate their body cameras.
The hearing also included top police and city officials including Mayor Libby Schaaf, and the attorneys who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Oakland in 2000 after a group of Oakland police officers known as “The Riders” were accused of beating Black residents, planting drugs on them and falsifying records.
Oakland has been under federal oversight for decades, it turns out. It’s not alone, although it’s one of the longest cases. That process is a way for the federal camel to get its nose – and a large portion of its body – inside the local police tent (the article linked is from May of 2021):
After a four-year hiatus under President Donald Trump, the federal government will once again investigate local law enforcement agencies for systemic constitutional violations, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last month. First in the queue are the police departments of Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.
Both cities were at the heart of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer…
The federal investigations and possible court orders to follow could take years to complete. Local police departments under federal oversight complain about the immense strain on resources and personnel it takes to meet court-approved benchmarks for accountability, training and amended use-of-force policies. Community activists sometimes feel federal oversight does not do enough to fix systemic issues…
“I never once in my time there saw DOJ launch one of these investigations unless they had determined there was a long history [of abuses] and the agency has either been unable or unwilling to fix those problems,” said Christy Lopez, a former federal attorney who led the Department of Justice team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department after an officer shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014.
She also led federal investigations of local police in Chicago, Los Angeles and New Orleans, as well as in Newark, New Jersey, and Missoula, Montana.
“The government has a responsibility to protect people,” continued Lopez, who now co-leads Georgetown Law’s Program on Innovative Policing. “When you have state actors routinely violating people’s rights, of course you need a system for someone else to step in and protect those rights, vindicate those rights.”
Note the list of cities.
The practice begin as a result of a law passed by Congress in the wake of the Rodney King case:
Three years after the horrific beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, Congress enacted a law in 1994 that gave the Justice Department authority to investigate local police departments to see whether there is a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutionality or civil rights abuses.
The measure allowed the federal government to look beyond individual officers to root out systemic issues in local law enforcement agencies. The first investigation took place in 1997, examining the Pittsburgh Police Department.
The DOJ uses some sort of incident to claim systemic racism (or other problems I suppose, but my sense is that racism is the main one) and then to put the local police under a consent decree. These consent decrees last until the DOJ is satisfied – which can take a long long long time. Such a process is not uncommon, either:
Enforced by a judge and overseen by a court-approved monitor, consent decrees can take years to complete. The Oakland Police Department has been under a consent decree since 2003.
Over the past three decades, the Justice Department has conducted more than 70 investigations of local police departments. The Obama administration, for example, conducted 25 investigations and entered into 14 consent decrees.
And then there was Trump:
The investigations all but stopped when Trump was elected president. In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an order limiting the Justice Department’s ability to investigate and oversee the nation’s 18,000 local police departments, saying it wasn’t the federal government’s responsibility to oversee local policing. He also said the probes hurt police morale.
The Trump administration did not enter into a single consent decree.
But that approach changed last month, when Garland rescinded Sessions’ order.
This is the way the feds establish control, or partial control, and/or the constant threat of control, over local police forces.
[NOTE: The entire article is well worth reading. Here’s another fascinating tidbit that gives you some of the flavor of the process and the people who are involved [emphasis mine]:
There can be tension between the police departments under investigation and the federal attorneys instructing them on what amounts to a constitutional violation, said Sharon Brett, one of the lead attorneys for the Obama administration’s investigation of the Chicago Police Department. She also worked on consent decrees for Cincinnati; Seattle; Ferguson, Missouri, and other cities.
When Brett would sit down with officers during the investigation, she recalled, the first question she would get is whether she had ever been a police officer or served in the military.
“There’s a sense among the rank-and-file that, you don’t know what I’m dealing with if you’ve never been here,” said Brett, who now is the legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. “Law enforcement does not like people coming in who have no law enforcement experience and telling them how to do their job correctly.”
Now, why on earth would anyone resent that?]
