The DOJ plans to pause police reform plans with two US cities. What is a consent decree?
The Justice Department announced it will abandon negotiations for court-approved settlements with police departments in two U.S. cities despite previous findings that authorities regularly violated Black people’s civil rights.
Negotiations over the settlements, or consent decrees, had been initiated after two separate cases in 2020 that drew worldwide attention and outrage, including the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police office Derek Chauvin and the killing of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville carrying out a no-knock warrant. But some feared rollbacks would be imminent with Trump's 2024 presidential victory.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the department's Civil Rights Division made the announcement days before the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020. Floyd died when Chauvin kneeled on his neck despite Floyd’s protests that he could not breathe.
In her announcement, Dhillon said the department would retract accusations made under the Biden administration that the departments violated either Floyd’s or Taylor’s constitutional rights.
“Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees," Dhillon said.
What is a consent decree?
According to the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit group focused on criminal justice reform, a consent decree is basically a court-enforced “performance improvement plan” approved by all parties that is legally binding. They’re used in everything from environmental regulation to antitrust cases.
In the realm of law enforcement, they’re typically prompted by Justice Department investigations into patterns of misconduct, the group said.
The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act gave the DOJ’s civil rights division the ability to investigate systemic police misconduct. Between 1994 and 2016, 20 of the nearly 70 investigations conducted by the department produced court-enforced consent decrees, according to a 2017 report.
The decrees are legal agreements mandating changes overseen by both a federal court and an independent monitor. Such investigations, agreement negotiations and reform plans often take years to unfold.
Dhillon, of the DOJ, said the sweeping court agreements being negotiated with police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville would have micromanaged management, training, performance evaluations, discipline, recruitment and hiring.
In Louisville, the city had reached an agreement with the DOJ and was ready to begin carrying out the plan but was delayed by a lack of approval from a federal judge. However, Metro Government press secretary Kevin Trager said the city and Mayor Craig Greenberg were prepared to move foward.
"If this decree, ultimately, is not approved, Mayor Greenberg has pledged to implement the decree locally with an independent monitor and a method for community feedback,” Trager said.
Do consent decrees work?
Consent decrees have been credited with bettering some of the country's 18,000 police departments. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the city and the DOJ looked to suspend certain elements of their consent decree after the independent monitor found the city and its police force had fully complied with 99% of the agreement terms.
And in Ferguson, Missouri, where the fatal 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent mass protests made the city the epicenter for police reform, major changes were evident eight years later, including a more racially diverse police department and less frequent traffic stops.
However, some complain that consent decrees are too costly and cumbersome to be effective. Additionally, National Fraternal Order of Police Executive Director Jim Pasco previously told Paste BN that consent decrees can worsen tensions between communities and police.
Contributing: Stephanie Kuzydym