Last month, the Trump administration announced it would withdraw from consent decrees in Louisville and Minneapolis that would’ve instituted federally mandated police reforms in both cities. While city leadership in Louisville and Minneapolis has given verbal confirmation that they will continue to implement the reforms agreed upon in the consent decrees, community members want the reforms to be codified into law.
According to KSTP, Minneapolis’s consent decree came after a two-year federal investigation found the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) routinely engaged in abusive, discriminatory behavior against Black people and people with disabilities. After the DOJ announced it would be withdrawing from the consent decree, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey made a verbal promise that the reforms would still be implemented.
“We’re doing it anyway,” Frey said on May 21 during a press conference.
Minneapolis City Council Members Robin Wonsley and Aurin Chowdhury and City Council President Elliott Payne have called for the reforms proposed in the consent decree to be rolled into an existing, court-enforceable settlement agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. They argue it’s necessary given that some of the reforms in the consent decree were stronger than the ones in the existing settlement.
“This is about the verbal commitment that many council members have made and the mayor also has made in making sure that we have a legal commitment and our city attorney hears from the City Council that this is an action that we want to direct them to do,” Chowdhury told KSTP.
Consent decrees are legally binding agreements approved by a federal judge and are often used to implement police reform. It took so long for these decrees to be reached, given that the investigations were only able to take place after Merrick Garland, the attorney general during the Biden administration, ended a restriction on civil rights investigations into police departments implemented during the first Trump administration.
Louisville had only reached its consent decree late last year and was still awaiting approval from a federal judge before the DOJ made the move to withdraw. Similar to Minneapolis, Louisville’s Mayor Craig Greenberg has pledged that the city will continue to implement the proposed reforms.
“While this is not the outcome we hoped for when we stood right here in December and announced the decree, it is an outcome that we planned for,” Greenberg told reporters on May 21. “We, as a city, are committed to reform.”
Lyndon Pryor, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League, has concerns about how existing reforms have been implemented in the city and wants more than a verbal promise to do better.
“Officer-involved shootings have continued to persist. We know there have been complaints made against the department,” Pryor told Spectrum News 1. “Once you make these things a law, and it says, this is a way these things are going to happen, then we can really start to really hold people accountable. Right now, that accountability mechanism is not in place, and that’s critically important.”
The need for these reforms to be codified is more than obvious given how quickly local governments switched up on police reform as soon as it was politically expedient. In cities like Chicago and Houston, there were promises of police reform, with Houston even forming a task force to investigate city policies and find ways to implement meaningful reform. Five years later and residents are still wondering when those reforms will finally be implemented.
“While some gains were made, there were a lot of gains that were not made. They give us [police reforms] with a teaspoon, and they take them back with a shovel,” Frank Chapman, executive director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, told WBEZ with regard to Chicago’s efforts in police reform.
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Department announced last month it would not only file motions to dismiss existing consent decrees but would also end investigations into police departments accused of civil rights violations.
But don’t worry y’all, all the time and energy they would’ve spent investigating police brutality will instead be focused on making sure schools aren’t going out of their way to make education more equitable for Black and brown students.
Source: NewsOne