Hopes pinned on Justice Department to lead charge on police reform

As public furor grows over the recent spate of high-profile police killings of unarmed black men, all eyes are on the Department of Justice to lead the charge for law enforcement reform.  

The DOJ has historically been one of the few federal entities with oversight over local and state police. When law enforcement agencies are accused of showing patterns of problematic practices and civil rights violations, the DOJ has the ability to open multiyear audits and enter into negotiated settlements with police departments to mandate changes.

Since 1994 — when Congress granted the DOJ power to open such audits after the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers — the DOJ’s civil rights division has opened investigations into more than 20 police departments in cities, including Cincinnati, Cleveland, Seattle, New Orleans and Pittsburgh.

Mandated reform efforts have included changes in training to emphasize avoiding racial bias and excessive force, requiring police departments to collect detailed records on practices and implementing early intervention systems that flag patterns of questionable behavior by specific officers.

Police departments are sometimes hostile to federal intervention, and the changes are often politically unpopular. But Stephen Rushin, a law professor at the University of Illinois who specializes in police reform, said the results are typically positive.

“It’s been extraordinarily effective where it has been used,” he said. “Once they’ve implemented all the changes, normally the police departments are empirically in much better shape.”

Such investigations, however, are saved for only the “worst of the worst,” Rushin said, and with the DOJ's limited resources, only a smattering of the country’s 18,000 police departments will ever come under federal scrutiny.

Criminal justice experts and reform advocates say the patchwork nature of law enforcement tactics and policies makes any kind of systemic change difficult, even as the recent string of racially charged incidents involving police seems to illustrate the pervasiveness of the problems.

“Policing in the United States is decentralized. Every police department has its own way of operating … so, historically, changing the ways things are done is a very large undertaking,” said Faiza Patel, a co-director of the Liberty and National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reform. “Historically, federal civil rights law can raise the standards used by police departments. They provide a mechanism by which you can bring a number of police departments into compliance instead of going through them one by one.”

Maria Maki Haberfeld, a political science professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said she is not sure even the DOJ has that kind of broad reach activists are looking for.

“There’s no other entity that can create mandatory outline for what police departments can follow, and I’m not really sure that the Department of Justice can force changes that will be mandatory for every single police department,” she said. “There needs to be willingness for compliance.”

Still, in the wake of the decisions not to indictment Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo — the two white officers responsible for the killings of African-Americans Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner on Staten Island in New York, respectively — activists are encouraging the DOJ to be as aggressive as possible to provide accountability.

Wilson fatally shot Brown during an altercation in August, sparking nationwide demonstrations. Wilson said he was acting in self-defense, although some witnesses contend that Brown was surrendering when he was gunned down. Garner died in July after Pantaleo put him into an illegal chokehold as he and other New York police officers were attempting to arrest Garner for selling loose cigarettes — an incident that was captured on camera. Both cases have prompted major protests and a national reckoning on issues of policing and racial bias in the justice system.  

The DOJ has announced a civil rights investigation into alleged patterns of discriminatory practices in the Ferguson Police Department and is weighing whether to pursue federal criminal civil rights charges against Pantaleo that could result in prosecution — although the bar for a federal indictment is higher than at the state or local level. 

Some hope the DOJ and other federal agencies will impose more conditions on state and local law enforcement agencies that receive federal dollars. In 2014, the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs provided $1.7 billion in grants to local and state agencies for various criminal justice programs. That money could come with requirements that encourage police departments to use body cameras, collect better records and change their training.  

“Generally what happens when a police department learns their funding is in jeopardy, they fall in line, and they implement reforms to ensure their funding stream doesn’t disappear,” said Vincent Southerland, senior counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. “Having that hammer of funding being held over the heads of these local and state law enforcement agencies can be used as leverage to incentivize the behavior you want to see.”

Criminal justice reform advocates said although the problems run deep, it would be a mistake to waste the momentum building around reform, particularly as it relates to racial bias.

“These are not new phenomena. They’ve been happening for generation after generation, decade after decade,” Southerland said. “I’m just hopeful that the momentum doesn’t slow down. I’m hopeful the anger and outrage and righteous frustration turns into substantive action and reforms.”