The Importance of Sustaining Police Reform as the DOJ Scraps Consent Decrees

The Importance of Sustaining Police Reform as the DOJ Scraps Consent Decrees

Five years ago this week marked the beginning of a national reckoning with a history of police practices that failed to respect or protect the civil rights of many vulnerable groups in this nation. George Floyd’s death on May 25th, 2020 was not the first time a defenseless person died at the hands of police, but because of a 10-minute cellphone video viewed across the Nation and, indeed, the world, it was the first time every community in our country had to confront their own problems between police and citizens. Interestingly, this week the US Department of Justice decided that it would abandon its efforts to change this history through what are known as its “pattern and practice”  investigations into institutional civil rights violations by officers in Minneapolis, Louisville, Memphis, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, and elsewhere.

Make no mistake: the systemic violations the Department’s investigations have exposed have never been the product of individual bad actors or rogue cops. They are the manifestations of bad systems, not bad apples. When officers take an oath, dedicating their lives to serve the community, in harm’s way, on nights and weekends and holidays, at significant personal expense, they do all of this in good faith. So how is it that we have so many bad outcomes across geography and race, in cities big and small, in red and blue states, where police officers violate citizens’ rights? It’s faulty systems of recruiting, training, policy, accountability, and community engagement between police and citizens. It is because police are not born; they are made.  Police, like all of us, do what they are taught, trained, and allowed to do. Bad systems make good people act badly.

In 1998, then-President of South Africa Nelson Mandela, on the occasion of accepting the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Report after suffering under Apartheid rule for decades, remarked, “We are extricating ourselves from a system that insulted our common humanity by dividing us from one another,” a truth that similarly touches communities that have lived through tragedies at the hands of their own police. Both police officers and citizens are dehumanized by bad systems. To regain their humanity takes an honest, difficult, unfiltered examination of these systems, and a sustained conversation between those who design and operate the systems and those who must live under them, officers or citizens. This is the tough work Effective Law Enforcement for All (ELEFA) engages in and leads every day. 

Our teams have lived experience in this work, on both the police side and on the oversight side, and we have come together with our academic, legal, operational, and leadership experience to provide solutions to communities who believe they have no place to turn after federal and local governments have disavowed judicial oversight. Like our work in Montgomery County, Maryland’s Reimagining Public Safety project, we offer solutions based in collaboration between municipalities, police, and citizens, understanding that reform can’t happen without any of these. While we believe federal consent decrees can be effective tools to achieve effective and just policing, we know that they are not the only tools. Grassroots collaborative reform can drive change that endures beyond consent decrees, because the systems and results are collectively owned by municipal, police, and community leaders who believe in them. If this sort of change is what your community needs, please learn more about ELEFA at our website elefa.org.