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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • Nov. 18, 2015
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INSIDE
Student’s homicide hits too close - 2 The death of Linwood Lambert- 5 LGBTQ life inside the black church- 8 Va. tackles veteran homelessness - 13
Richmond & Hampton Roads
Carson & Jesus: Is this so wrong?
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Investigating the investigators
ongress empowered the federal government to police local law enforcement in 1994 in the aftermath of the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles officers after a high-speed car chase. Under the law, the Justice Department can investigate and force systemic changes on local police and sue if they do not comply. Many of the federal investigations have started with complaints from civil rights groups or after a high-profile news event, such as the 2014 shooting in Ferguson of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer. In Washington, Justice’s civil rights division receives about 200 complaints per week, many of them concerning some portion of the nation’s more than 15,000 police departments. Its attorneys focus on the ones in which they see abuse patterns, including racial profiling, unlawful arrests and illegal searches. Most investigations include allegations of excessive force. “The police departments that we go into, small or big, are ones where there have been findings of pretty significant systemic pattern-or-practice constitutional violations,” Gupta said. “Whether they’re the worst, I don’t know. Whether they are in crisis, yes.” Jonathan Smith, who headed the division’s special litigation section for five years until April, said some departments have been targeted because their problems illustrate larger nationwide issues. “A good example is that we took on a bunch of cases where one of the critical elements was how police use force against persons who are in mental health crisis,” Smith said, citing Albuquerque’s 2014 reform agreement. In the past two decades, the Justice Department has launched 67 civil rights investigations of police departments. Nine remain unresolved. Of the completed investigations, 24 were closed without reform agreements, meaning investigators did not have sufficient evidence to prove civil rights abuses or the agencies informally resolved the problems, officials said. In eight investigations, Justice documented patterns of civil rights abuses and won promises from the departments to reform. Those cases were settled out of court with no independent or federal oversight. Twenty-six investigations - a little more than half of them since President Barack Obama took office - have led to the most rigorous outcome: binding agreements tracked by monitors. More
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“The goal isn't that we have a perfect police department when we leave ... The goal is that they actually know what to do when there’s a problem.” -- Vanita Gupta, DOJ than half were consent decrees, meaning they were approved and managed in federal court. Of the 26, Justice found patterns of excessive force in 16 of its investigations. The other 10 were investigations that found abuses including uninvestigated sexual assaults and racial profiling. Oversight continues until the monitor concludes that local police have completed or complied with most reforms. The Justice Department’s only broad assessment of its interventions occurred as part of a 2010 roundtable with police chiefs from some of the departments targeted. One of the conclusions: Federal officials had no universal way to measure impact and needed better data to determine whether reforms worked. But numbers will not tell the full story, experts said.
“The hard question - have you stopped doing the things that got you into court in the first place - is something that these consent decrees seem to have trouble answering,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law at Columbia University who has studied reform agreements. Justice officials said the newest generation of reform agreements, starting with Seattle in 2012 and 11 police departments since, includes benchmarks to indicate whether the reforms are taking hold. Gupta, the civil rights division chief, said Justice can then adjust as needed. She also said Justice officials are working more closely with local law enforcement and community members to build trust. She cited federal reforms of police in East Haven, Conn., Seattle and Los Angeles as successes that have produced “transformation.” “And transformation is more than just . . . enactment of specific reforms,” Gupta said. “It really is a fundamental change in how the community relates to the police department and vice versa.” But she said once the monitoring ends, so does Justice’s involvement. “We don’t tend to evaluate . . . after we have left,” Gupta said. “There’s a limit to how much we can . . . remain engaged with a particular jurisdiction given our limited resources.” Some critics have complained that federal interventions leave abusive officers in uniform because the agreements target policies and practices of an agency, not individual employees. But experts said reforming departments is more important than trying to punish officers. Most of the agencies targeted have agreed to the federal demands, although this year the Justice Department lost its first case, against the 117-officer sheriff’s office in Alamance County, N.C. Justice sued Sheriff Terry S. Johnson in 2012 for his agency’s alleged targeting of Latinos during traffic stops. U.S. District Judge Thomas D. Schroeder dismissed the case in August after finding that Justice did not present “reliable and persuasive proof” of a pattern or practice of civil rights abuses. The department, which declined to comment on the case, has appealed his ruling. Johnson also declined to comment for this article. “Unfortunately, most law enforcement agencies are afraid to challenge the civil rights division, even when its claims are completely bogus,” said Alamance County Attorney Clyde B. Albright. - FL