Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered the Justice Department to review its reform agreements with police departments around the country, in order to make sure that said agreements “do not work against the Trump administration’s goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime.”
In a two-page memo released Monday, Sessions said agreements reached previously between the department’s civil rights division and local police departments — a key legacy of the Obama administration — will be subject to review by his two top deputies, throwing into question whether all of the agreements will stay in place.
And with Ol’ Jeff in charge, what could possibly go wrong, right? Except, of course, for the fact that Sessions has been a very vocal critic of these agreements and has often vowed to more vigorously support law enforcement as Trump’s Top Cop.
Since 2009, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations into law enforcement agencies and has been enforcing 14 consent decrees, along with some other agreements. Civil rights advocates fear that Sessions’s memo could particularly imperil the status of agreements that have yet to be finalized, such as a pending agreement with the Chicago Police Department.
“This is terrifying,” said Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, who spent five years as the department’s chief of special litigation, overseeing investigations into 23 police departments such as New Orleans, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. “This raises the question of whether, under the current attorney general, the Department of Justice is going to walk away from its obligation to ensure that law enforcement across the country is following the Constitution.”
Essentially, this means that Sessions may be considering throwing out some of the already established police reform agreements. And it comes on the heels of a hearing with the Baltimore Police Department. The Baltimore agreement has been in the works since 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.
The memo was released not long before the department’s civil rights lawyers asked a federal judge to postpone until at least the end of June a hearing on a sweeping police reform agreement, known as a consent decree, with the Baltimore Police Department that was announced just days before President Trump took office.
You can check out the full DOJ memo here. It seems as if Jeff doesn’t trust the Obama administration’s efforts to ensure that the public has a right to safety and respect just like the cops do. But then again, this is Trump world, where critical thinking gives way to insanity and nuance is abandoned for a world of black and white. Their rationale is that “law and order” means we cannot possibly have police reform and accountability. In addition to concerns about whether or not the DOJ will honor its current agreements, advocates also worry what the review will signal to communities awaiting police reform—with good reason. If communities didn’t have a reason to trust police before, they most certainly will not now.