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‘It means open season:’ Under Trump, the Justice Department has largely stopped investigating police departments for systemic abuses
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Jun 10, 2020 07:58am |
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| Category | News |
| Author | Jess Bidgood and Jazmine Ulloa |
| News Date | Wednesday, June 10, 2020 12:50:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | For 20 years, investigations like those, and the consent decrees that followed, were key to federal efforts to bring more accountability to policing in the United States, especially during the Obama administration. But as the nation reckons again with racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is all but out of the business of systemic police reform.
Since President Trump took office, the Justice Department has sharply curbed its use of investigations and consent decrees, essentially locking those powerful tools in its toolbox. What’s more, the president himself has made multiple public statements that suggest he does not see police accountability as a high priority. And some former Justice Department officials and other criminal justice experts see a connection between the vacuum of accountability at the highest levels of government and the ongoing police violence that has sent Americans cascading into the streets to protest.
“It means open season — we’re not going to be there policing what you do, and we think you’ve been hamstrung and overly restrained,” said Christy Lopez, the former deputy chief of the special litigation section in the department’s Civil Rights Division, describing her sense of the Trump administration’s stance. She led the sweeping federal investigation of police abuses in Ferguson, Mo., after a white police officer shot and killed a Black teenager, Michael Brown, in 2014. |
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