20 Years of Police Reform
BY CURTIS BLACK
With the Trump administration backing away from federal civil rights inquiries into local police departments, it may be an appropriate moment for a review of 20 years of “patterns and practices” investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“For the most part” — and despite some “backsliding” — those investigations and resulting legal agreements have “been successful in improving seriously troubled law enforcement agencies,” writes Sam Walker, professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, in a new report.
Congress passed a law authorizing patterns and practices investigations in 1994, two years after riots in Los Angeles protesting the beating of Rodney King. The first investigation was initiated in Pittsburgh in 1997. Since then DOJhas opened 70 investigations and reached 40 consent decrees and legal settlements, mainly during the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Under Obama the scope of those investigations and the reach of the settlements grew substantially. Walker credits the Obama Justice Department with several major advances: the introduction of constitutional policing standards backed by a set of best practices; the consistent focus on the institutional failings underlying individual police misconduct; and the involvement of community residents, rank-and-file officers, and police unions in investigations and the implementation of settlements.
In Walker’s view, this unprecedented effort identified a key to the mystifying problem of transforming “police culture.” The investigations consistently found inadequate reporting of use-of-force incidents and a failure of supervisors to review force reports critically. DOJ’s recent report on the Chicago Police Department devotes a long discussion to the issue, including the non-specificity of CPD’s Tactical Response Reports (required following any incident involving lethal or non-lethal force by officers) and the automatic approval given them by sergeants and lieutenants.
Merely revising use-of-force policies is insufficient, says Walker. To get officers to comply with a new policy, it is necessary to establish detailed reporting and review requirements. He calls this “the heart and soul” of accountability and departmental transformation.
While officers typically complain — at least initially — of burdensome paperwork, Walker argues that reporting and review requirements can drive “a fundamental shift in police culture, defined here as the accepted work norms of the job.”
In Chicago, rank-and-file officers complained about a new investigatory stops report form introduced under a legal settlement in January 2016, and the form was subsequently shortened. A court-appointed monitor found recently that officers gave legal reasons for street stops in a far higher proportion than previously found, but stops still disproportionately targeted African Americans.
In its recent Next Steps for Reform framework, CPD said it plans to revise its Tactical Response Report and develop a system for supervisory review of reports in ways that appear to respond to DOJ’s criticisms.
In another recent paper, Walker argues that while the Trump administration is moving away from efforts to reform local police departments, “de-escalation, procedural justice, greater police openness, and other new reform measures have been embraced by many police leaders across the country, and have acquired an impressive degree of momentum.”
Sessions Memo
Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo calling for a review of all “existing or contemplated consent decrees” between DOJ and local law enforcement agencies last week, casting more doubt on prospects for a court-enforced agreement with Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Supt. Eddie Johnson responded with a statement affirming their commitment to reform.
“Now that the feds have backed off, we urge the mayor and the City Council to appoint an independent monitor of their own,” the Sun-Times editorial boardwrote Wednesday.
At a forum at the Cultural Center on Tuesday, Sun-Times editorial page editor Tom McNamee raised that possibility with Emanuel. The mayor’s response was noncommittal.
Sessions’ memo pushes the “false narrative” that “if you support reform and accountability, you’re somehow anti-police,” Police Board president Lori Lightfoot told the Sun-Times.
Discussing steps the city now needs to take, Lightfoot said, “Someone — whether it’s the mayor or his corporation counsel — needs to articulate what the values are that they’re going to bring to [contract] negotiations [with police unions].”
Sessions has said he hasn’t read DOJ’s reports on Chicago and Ferguson, Missouri – and the Chicago report provides strong evidence contradicting his central arguments, according to The Chicago Reporter.
Sessions’ dismissal of the DOJ report on Ferguson, Missouri — which “uncovered direct evidence of racial bias in the communications of influential Ferguson decision makers,” and focused on the criminalization of petty offenses by black residents as a source of revenue — ignores “a crucial and near-unimpeachable witness to the abuse of black Americans by entities meant to protect and represent them,” the Atlantic wrote.
“Sessions’ memo reads as an announcement that it is no longer the business of the federal government if American citizens’ rights are violated by those sworn to protect them and empowered with lethal force to do so,” according to the Atlantic.
National Responses
A federal judge approved a consent decree between Baltimore and the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, denying a DOJ request that he postpone action for 30 days.
The order by U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar is effective immediately, the Baltimore Sun reported.
“The case is no longer in a phase where any party is unilaterally entitled to reconsider the terms of the settlement; the parties are bound to each other by their prior agreement,” Bredar wrote in his order.
Attorney General Sessions said he has “grave concerns that some provisions of this decree will reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city.”
Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis welcomed the decision, which he said “will support and in fact accelerate many needed reforms in the areas of training, technology, and internal accountability systems.”
Earlier in the week, Bredar denied a Justice Department motion seeking a 90-day postponement, allowing a public hearing to go ahead the next day. There dozens of community residents testified in favor of the consent decree. The city’s attorney said the agreement was crafted with deep input from the community, careful consideration of public safety and measures to better train and equip police officers, the Sun reported.
Elsewhere, the lead monitor for a consent decree with the New Orleans Police Department said the consent decree was still in place. “The court will continue to monitor the implementation of the decree that benefits the citizens of New Orleans and is supported by the city and the police department,” said Jonathan Aronie.
“They can’t undo the consent decree in Seattle,” said City Attorney Pete Holmes, as plans for expanded oversight were unveiled.
Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus pointed out that Sessions argues it’s not the responsibility of the federal government to manage local agencies — yet he demands local police departments enforce federal immigration law.
Public Safety IG Appointed
Inspector General Joe Ferguson appointed criminologist Laura Kunard, a “veteran police reformer and researcher,” as deputy inspector general for public safety, a position created by ordinance last year based on a recommendation from the mayor’s Police Accountability Task Force.
Kunard is currently on the court-appointed independent monitoring team overseeing the Justice Department’s consent decree with Albuquerque’s police department. She was founding director of the Institute on Public Safety and Social Justice at Chicago’s Adler School of Psychology, focused on restorative justice and police interactions with people with mental illness.
The new deputy inspector’s role — auditing police accountability systems and identifying patterns of constitutional violations — will be even more important in the absence of a federal consent decree, Lori Lightfoot told the Tribune.
Johnson Testifies
Testifying in a wrongful death lawsuit, Supt. Eddie Johnson recalled being shot by a carjacking suspect in a 2005 incident as he described how a fleeing suspect can shoot a pursuer. Johnson said an officer could be justified in shooting a fleeing suspect in the back, if the suspect had a gun.
The subject of the lawsuit is the 2013 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Christian Green by Officer Robert Gonzalez, who testified that Green turned and pointed a gun at him. Green was shot once in the back. Security video showed Green attempting to discard a gun and picking it up when it bounced off the rim of a garbage can, before Green ran into the vacant lot where he was shot. A gun was recovered 75 feet from Green’s body.
On Friday an eyewitness contradicted Gonzalez’s claim that Green was armed when he was shot.
Another Guevara Case
Buzzfeed gives an in-depth account of the career of Detective Reynaldo Guevara, and the decades-long organizing efforts by relatives of men imprisoned based on Guevara’s investigations, focusing on the case of Roberto Almodovar. After hearing closing arguments on the motion for a new hearing by Almodovar and co-defendant William Negron, Judge James K. Linn said he expects to issue a ruling on April 20.
In December State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped an appeal (filed by her predecessor Anita Alvarez) of a court ruling granting a new hearing on a motion to suppress their confessions by two other Guevara victims, Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes. But so far Foxx’s office is still defending their convictions. A status hearing on that case is set for April 27.
Watts Update
At the Intercept, Jamie Kalven updates the story of Sgt. Ronald Watts and the code of silence surrounding his extortion ring. Kalven covers the settlement of the lawsuit by CPD whistleblowers Shannon Spaulding and Daniel Echeverria, after key CPD witnesses were found to have falsified official reports in other cases; the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate wrongful convictions engineered by Watts, following the exoneration of Ben Baker and Lionel White (in both those cases a Watts underling, Alvin Jones, played a key role; he’s since been promoted to sergeant); and the uncertainty of federal support for police reform, which underscores the importance of the Watts investigation “to deepen our understanding of the operation of the code of silence.”
Join the Invisible Institute this Thursday, April 13 for a conversation between former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper and Jamie Kalven on Stamper’s new book To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police at the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave (7p).
