Attempts to force change in police departments across the nation have met with mixed success.
On Friday, Chicago agreed to revamp its Police Department after the Justice Department found routine use of excessive force, and the mayor said he would negotiate a court-enforced settlement, known as a consent decree. But that is no guarantee of results.
President Barack Obama's administration made police reform a signature issue. It has opened 25 investigations into law enforcement agencies over issues like excessive force, racial bias and poor supervision, issuing reports choking with anger.
Los Angeles, which was under a consent decree for 11 years, is regarded as one of the great success stories. "Los Angeles is a different place today because of the consent decree and the leadership of the department," said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington think tank. In Detroit, which emerged from a 13-year consent decree last year, officer shootings and unwarranted arrests have declined significantly.
But Pittsburgh, the target of the first consent decree based on a Justice Department finding of a "pattern and practice" of misconduct, backslid after changes in leadership, said Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
And while Miami reduced police shootings to zero for 20 months after a federal investigation in 2002 that was later closed with no settlement, the Justice Department in 2013 reinvestigated and found a pattern of excessive force with firearms, underscoring some experts' view that consent decrees or other settlements are needed for enduring improvements. Last year, Miami settled the 2013 inquiry by agreeing to improve supervision, training and internal investigations.
The pattern-and-practice approach developed after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991 forced a period of national introspection over how to curb misconduct if individual officers could not be held accountable. A jury's decision not to convict the four officers charged in the attack on King incited deadly riots.
Since the early attempts, Walker said, consent decrees have evolved to be more sophisticated and comprehensive. "The general pattern is that there is some backsliding on some issues," he said, "but I don't think there's a case where a department has completely collapsed back to where it was before."
Still, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and nominee for attorney general under President-elect Donald Trump, called them dangerous, writing in 2008 that they "constitute an end run around the democratic process." At his confirmation hearing last week, he softened that critique, saying there were some circumstances that legitimately demanded consent decrees and that those in place would be enforced.
But, Sessions said, lawsuits could unfairly target whole police departments for the misdeeds of a few bad actors. "These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness," he said.
His critique did not extend to how well consent decrees work. But experts say even systemic changes, like greater oversight of officers' use of force, can be slow to yield results.
"They change the 'inputs' through training, record keeping, community involvement and other internal reforms, but the inputs don't necessarily translate into changes in 'outputs' including racial disparities, use of force, or other constitutional issues," Jeff Fagan, a Columbia University law professor, wrote in an email.
"The results have been quite variable."
Consent decrees can span years and many of the Obama administration's key settlements have just begun, including those in Cleveland and in Albuquerque, N.M., so their long-term success can't yet be assessed.
Some reform advocates have expressed fears that the Trump administration will fail to investigate police departments or enforce consent decrees, robbing them of what they view as a crucial lever to compel change.
A Section on 01/15/2017