Renewed Push for Consent Decrees Spurs Resistance and Skepticism
While federal officials point to the potential for improving the implementation of consent decrees, police unions and city officials decry their cost, question their effectiveness and resist monitor decisions.
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While Attorney General Merrick Garland has reauthorized the Justice Department to pursue federal consent decrees in policing and other areas, including housing and the environment, police leadership, officer unions and community activists have decried the high costs and indefinite timetables of the court-approved settlements that require monitors, reports the Washington Post. Local jurisdictions have paid police monitors up to $2 million per year, even as supervision often stretches on longer than city leaders expect. However, Merrick Bobb, a former federal monitor for Seattle’s 2011 consent decree, warns that consent decrees and their monitors can face the kind of constant resistance that he encountered from city officials and police unions that said his team was tone-deaf and lacked clear performance goals.
Their clashes highlight the struggles of federal monitors who have been appointed more than two dozen times across the country since 1994 to force change in troubled police agencies, but who according to their critics have not achieved lasting, measurable results. Police union officials contend that monitors have an incentive to keep the consent decrees going because their salaries depend on it. Some monitors have served on teams in multiple cities, sometimes simultaneously. Today, federal authorities are examining ways to establish clearer progress benchmarks, improve community participation and tighten rules for monitors. Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department official in the Obama administration, said the federal government now has enough experience to play a stronger role in crafting guidelines and managing public expectations. Monitors and judges “don’t want to leave before a department is completely fixed,” said Lopez. She believes some reforms must be addressed through legislation and policy changes that happen in tandem with, or after, consent-decree implementation.
