Judge blocks request to delay police hearing

Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, asked the judge, U.S. District Judge James Bredar, to delay making his decision for 90 days so that the Justice Department, now operating under new guidelines from the president, could have time to “review and assess” it before its implementation.

“It’s not about one bad officer”. That investigation culminated with a release of a report in the summer of 2016 that contained damning conclusions about the practices of Baltimore police officers in regards to their treatment of minority residents. “It will take all of us – City government, the police department, and the families and residents of our great City – to see this reform process through to its conclusion so that we can realize a better Baltimore”, she said.

But in the 23 years since the Justice Department was given authority to investigate local law enforcement agencies suspected of unconstitutional practices, police departments haven’t always been willing participants in court-stipulated reform agreements, known as consent decrees. All of them are all still active. It struck the agreement after a Department of Justice investigation concluded Seattle police officers routinely used excessive force.

Seattle’s reform efforts are focused on use of force and civilian oversight of police.

This is a departure from the reforms undertaken by the Obama administration under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, who made local police department reform a priority of their Justice Departments. Consent decrees are binding legal agreements, and once signed, they are overseen by a federal judge and an appointed monitor.

But there are things the DOJ can do to undermine it.

One of these agreements was reached in Baltimore after the Freddie Gray case that left a man dead after a fatal auto ride in a police cruiser. “After all, these injunctions are entered to protect the public interest”, Smith said.

Signed by the attorney general and directed to the department heads at Justice and to US attorneys across the country, it directs the deputy attorney general and the associate attorney general to review all collaborative arrangements between Justice and local police departments, including consent decrees “existing or contemplated”.

On Tuesday, city officials told the judge in a court filing that they oppose a 90-day extension to the hearing.

In the context of the police reform, consent decrees involve the Justice Department working with a particular police department to correct finding systemic issues within it (though legally, this is not an admission of guilt by the department).

After the violence and protests that wracked Baltimore in the wake of Gray’s death, the city has attempted to embrace the idea of police reform, and it is not taking Sessions’ meddling lightly.

Sessions’s move sparked concern from civil rights advocates that pending agreements could be imperiled, including one with the police department of Chicago, which Rush partly represents.

In many ways, nothing has changed for Cleveland’s police reform efforts since Trump took office in January. Five years later, the department was released from the agreement after implementing significant reforms that included installing video recorders in police cars and improving its system of reviewing police shootings.

Trump’s drastic budget cuts would be a “silent killer” of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “At that point it’s not a matter of will”.

“We don’t believe Attorney Sessions should be trying to balance his desire to resolve political issues on the backs of the victims of police brutality”, Nelson said.

“To say that they may have been flawed in cases where they were able to reach an agreement in cases where they found some harm – but not able to be flawed in cases where they didn’t find any harm – to me seems to be biased and strategically motivated to discredit the work of the Justice Department under the Obama administration”, he said. The Justice Department has started a broad review of federal agreements that were meant to overhaul troubled police departments. The Justice Department asked for the continuance in the case at the close of business on Monday.

In his first major speech as attorney general, given to a gathering of state attorneys general in February, Sessions talked about the causes of the uptick in crime in big cities over the past two years, telling his audience that that increase is “driving a sense that we’re in danger”.