What May Happen to Policing as Federal Oversight Ends

New York Times

21-05-2025

Twenty years ago, the reputation of the New Orleans Police Department was in tatters. Officers had opened fire on a group of civilians leaving the city after Hurricane Katrina, and then tried to cover it up.
They killed other people with impunity, a Justice Department investigation found. They forgot to lift fingerprints at homicide scenes. Police dogs attacked their handlers.
Today, the department's stature has vastly improved, even in the eyes of some of its most stringent critics. 'I have seen dramatic improvements in many aspects of N.O.P.D.'s handling of misconduct,' said William Most, a civil rights lawyer who regularly represents clients who are suing the police.
Mr. Most attributes the improvement to a consent decree, an agreement that has kept the department under strict federal oversight for more than a decade. Such agreements are rarely used but can bring extensive change. They are the federal government's most powerful tool to overhaul troubled departments, and they set a de facto standard for American policing.
But they also have critics, who say that the agreements are written with little regard for their practical effects, and that they go beyond correcting unconstitutional behavior to impose a progressive vision of policing.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration, which has been critical of consent decrees, announced that it was dropping the consent decree process in eight jurisdictions. The moves dashed the hopes of residents who saw federal intervention as their best hope of forcing change, but pleased those who saw the agreements as too broad, too restrictive of the police and too ideological.
Consent decrees and investigations are based on 'unrealistic, idealistic expectations,' said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division. She accused federal investigators of trying to 'micromanage' local police departments.
Ms. Dhillon and other critics argue that crime can increase after an agreement begins, although research shows that the increase is temporary and that use of force by police and lawsuits against them eventually decline.
At their most basic, law enforcement consent decrees work like this: The Justice Department, or in some cases a state agency, opens an investigation and then identifies a 'pattern or practice' of civil rights violations in a police department — wrongs that go beyond the actions of one or two officers.
These can be broad, such as excessive force, unjustified searches, racial bias or, in the case of Ferguson, Mo., the use of questionable arrests to wring money from residents in the form of fines and fees. Or they can be more specific, like unlawful body searches or mishandled sexual assault cases.
Sometimes an investigation is precipitated by a high-profile incident like the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., and Tyre Nichols in Memphis.
The Justice Department found in an investigation of the Louisville police that officers had ordered a dog to repeatedly bite a 14-year-old who was not resisting arrest, for example. In Memphis, it found that police officers shoved and pepper-sprayed people after they were handcuffed.
The investigations are not always targeted at major cities. In Lexington, Miss., a town of about 1,200 people and 10 officers, the Biden administration found that officers used retaliation, racial slurs and excessive force, detained poor people who could not pay their fines, and made arrests for conduct that was not criminal.
Jason Johnson, who was a deputy police chief in Baltimore overseeing compliance with that city's consent decree, and who is now the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund said the investigations relied on 'inflammatory' anecdotes and did not make their methodology clear.
'There's a lot of innuendo and you have to make a lot of logical leaps when you read their findings reports,' he said. 'We don't really know if they're warranted or not.'
The cities targeted by these investigations may face a civil rights lawsuit, but most agree instead to correct the violations voluntarily — in other words, by consent. They negotiate an agreement, or consent decree, usually with the Justice Department.
Because the goal is systemic change, the agreements can be enormous documents that dictate a top-to-bottom overhaul. They may require changes to policies, training, disciplinary procedures, recruitment and promotion criteria. The process evolved to become more comprehensive, former Justice Department lawyers say, as they learned from experience and tried to guard against backsliding once the monitors were gone.
The Biden administration touted reductions in police use of force and the number of critical incidents, as well as metrics specific to certain departments. In Baltimore, for example, where Freddie Gray died in 2015 after a ride in a police van, the Justice Department has monitored injuries during police transports. There have been 11 injuries, out of 16,000 transports, a department spokeswoman said last year.
In an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Ms. Dhillon said the Biden administration's methods 'were based on faulty legal theories, incomplete data and flawed statistical methods.'
But many community members say the consent decree process helps restore some trust in the police.
'The problems don't completely disappear,' said Lawrence Hamm, chairman of the People's Organization for Progress, a civil rights group in Newark, where the department entered a consent decree in 2016. 'But at least there are policies in place that make it clear that this is not the way the department wants to go. And not only that, you could possibly be penalized for engaging in that behavior.'
The agreements can be costly to put into effect. During the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland took steps to cap the fees paid to monitors and trigger an automatic review of a consent decree after five years.
Defenders say that police departments where officers regularly violate people's rights can end up paying far more in misconduct settlements than what the consent decrees require. Cities like Newark and Minneapolis have paid tens of millions of dollars in such settlements.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced that it was retracting the findings of eight investigations conducted by the Biden administration, including in Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix, Oklahoma City and for the Louisiana State Police. In Louisiana, state troopers punched and dragged a shackled Black man named Ronald Greene, and then attributed his ensuing death to a car accident and tried to conceal the camera footage.
Thirteen consent decrees will remain in effect between the federal government and police departments, including in New Orleans. These can be ended only with a judge's approval.
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director on policing for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that residents must continue to press for changes. The A.C.L.U. is already working with local groups to try and pick up where the federal government is leaving off.
'Trump and D.O.J. can abandon police reform,' Ms. Borchetta said. 'But if local people are still pushing for it, it will succeed.'