AG Sessions Suspends DOJ “Pattern or Practice” Program – Stalls Federal Police Accountability Effort
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on this day suspended the Justice Department’s “pattern or practice” program, which for 20 years had investigated civil rights violations by local police departments and in 20 cases obtain consent decrees mandating a wide range of accountability-related reforms.
In his official statement, Sessions only said that the Justice Department would “review” this and other police programs, but all observers understood that it meant the end of the program. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Donald Trump had strongly supported the police and attacked police critics. The decision on this marked a fulfillment of his campaign promise to support the police.
The “pattern or practice” program was created in 1994 by the Violent Crime Control Act. The law authorized the Civil Rights Division of DOJ to investigate violations of constitutional rights by local police departments, and where the evidence supported it, to file suit to bring about needed police reforms. DOJ suits generally ended in a judicially enforced consent decree or memorandum of agreement requiring sweeping reforms to control police officer use of force, racial profiling, and other problems.
Over the course of 20 years (the first consent decree involved the Pittsburgh police department in 1997) reached settlements with 40 law enforcement agencies. The most noted settlements involved the Los Angeles, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Seattle, and Newark police departments. Perhaps the most famous was the investigation and consent decree with the Ferguson, Missouri, police department. Ferguson was the scene of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 17-year-old African American, which sparked violent protests in Ferguson, sympathetic protests around the country, and several years of protests of police shootings in other cities.
The DOJ consent decrees included a fairly standard set of reforms: a state-of-the-art use of force policy; strict requirements on police officers reporting each use of force; improved training for police officers; and early intervention system (EIS) to identify officers with problematic performance records; reform of the citizen complaint process to make it more open and accessible to local residents; and greater community involvement in police policy-making.
Read the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s 2017 report on the program’s 20 years of police reform work here
Read: Samuel Walker and Carol Archbold, The New World of Police Accountability, 3rd ed. (2020)
Learn about the police reform work of The Policing Project here