Emboldened by Trump, some police unions
seek to overhaul Obama’s reforms
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[January 30, 2017]
By Julia Harte and Timothy Mclaughlin
WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) - Steve
Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, had a
blunt message for Donald Trump during a meeting in September:
court-ordered reforms aimed at curbing police abuses in the midwestern
city are not working.
Loomis and two other attendees said Trump seemed receptive to Loomis's
concerns that federally monitored police reforms introduced during the
Obama administration in some cities in response to complaints of police
bias and abuse are ineffective and impose an onerous burden on police
forces.
Trump, Loomis said, was “taken aback by the waste of money” when the
union chief told him that federal monitors overseeing his city’s police
department earned $250 an hour - a standard salary for the position.
"I think he’s going to have a more sensible approach to rising crime
rates," Loomis said of now President Trump. "What I got from the meeting
was that Donald Trump is going be a very strong supporter of law and
order."
Emboldened by Trump's election, some of the country’s biggest police
groups want to renegotiate "consent decrees" agreed to under President
Barack Obama, the police labor groups said in interviews.

Consent decrees are agreements between a police force and the Justice
Department that can prescribe changes to use of force, recruiting,
training and discipline. They are enforced by a federal court with the
oversight of court-appointed monitors. Currently 14 police departments,
including Seattle and Miami, are operating under the decrees.
The police groups want to discuss the decrees with Jeff Sessions,
Trump's designee for attorney general who has voiced criticism of them,
although any renegotiation would be legally complicated because all
parties as well as a federal judge must approve any changes.
“There are certainly decrees that are inartfully applied that we’d like
to see revisited,” said Jim Pasco, the head of the Fraternal Order of
Police, the nation’s largest police union with 330,000 members. It
endorsed Trump in September and has worked with Sessions, a Republican
senator from Alabama, for years while lobbying Congress for pro-police
policies.
“We’ve always found him a man who’s willing to listen to alternatives to
a previously charted course,” Pasco said of Sessions.
Civil rights groups are alarmed at the possibility that the decrees
could be unraveled, saying they have been an important tool for the
government to try to address issues like excessive use of force by
police in Baltimore and an officer shooting in Ferguson, Missouri that
led to nationwide protests.
Trump officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the
meeting with Loomis.
While Trump has not publicly commented on consent decrees, he has
expressed strong support for police departments and unions, and on Jan.
20 the White House said he wants to end the "dangerous anti-police
atmosphere in America."
CURBING ABUSE
There have been questions by police and conservative politicians over
the effectiveness of the consent decrees, which give the Justice
Department power to obtain court orders imposing reforms on police
forces that routinely violate civil rights through practices such as
unlawful stops and seizures, racial discrimination, and illegal uses of
force.
The federal program was authorized by Congress in 1994 in the aftermath
of riots in Los Angeles sparked by the police beating of Rodney King.

Some police unions complain the decrees stigmatize police and impose
overly restrictive limits on use of force. They also chafe at what they
see as misguided federal prescriptions to local problems and have fought
the reforms in court.
A reform agreement that the Justice Department negotiated with the New
Orleans police department in 2013, for instance, has been
“extraordinarily expensive” to implement, said Donovan Livaccari, the
lawyer for the Louisiana Fraternal Order of Police. The city of New
Orleans is footing the bill.
The Obama administration negotiated 24 reform agreements with law
enforcement agencies during Obama's eight years in office after finding
patterns of excessive force, racial bias, poor supervision and other
issues, more than double the 11 agreements reached under the previous
Bush administration.
Vanita Gupta, the last Obama-appointed head of the Justice Department's
civil rights division, which investigates and recommends reforms for
police departments, defended the use of consent decrees in an interview,
saying they are apolitical ways of improving public safety and making
policing more effective.
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Donald Trump speaks to police gathered at the Fraternal Order of
Police lodge during a campaign event in Statesville, North Carolina.
REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Bill Johnson, head of the National Association of Police
Organizations, which represents about 241,000 officers, said he
expects local police associations to examine existing consent
decrees to see whether the Justice Department under Obama
overstepped in imposing any measures.
Some police union officials say they have been encouraged by
comments by Sessions, who has said that federal inquiries “smear”
police departments and “undermine respect for officers.”
“Under Attorney General Sessions, it’ll be more, ‘Okay, there’s a
problem, let’s craft an agreement as best we can and cure it, and
then move onto the next thing’,” Johnson said.
Union officials said they expect the Trump administration to
initiate and reach fewer binding reform agreements with police
departments, and they hope Sessions will work with them to try to
re-negotiate some of those existing agreements.
Sessions said in his confirmation hearing on Jan. 10 that he
“wouldn’t commit that there wouldn’t be any changes” to existing
consent decrees when he becomes attorney general if police
departments show improvement before they have fully complied with
the terms of the decree.
A Trump transition official said Sessions would not comment on his
testimony until after the Senate votes on his appointment. That vote
is not expected until February.
DECREES HAVE MIXED RESULTS
Not all union leaders agree that the decrees’ costs outweigh the
benefits.
Sean Smoot, who directs the Police Benevolent & Protective
Association of Illinois and serves as a monitor for the Cleveland
police reform agreement, said the federal inquiries prompt cities to
hire more cops and invest in better equipment.
The decrees have had mixed results. Reforms in some cities, such as
Los Angeles, have resulted in higher public satisfaction with police
and declines in reports of police use of force. In other places,
such as Ferguson, the city has missed multiple deadlines for
implementing reforms required by its decree.

Civil rights advocates in Chicago say that given Trump's law and
order platform they fear his administration will neglect the Justice
Department’s findings from a 13-month-long investigation into the
police force.
Issued in the last days of the Obama administration, the Justice
Department’s Jan. 13 report found that Chicago police routinely used
excessive force and violated the constitutional rights of residents,
particularly minorities. City officials signed an agreement to
negotiate a consent decree.
But with Trump in the White House, “it’s not clear where the
leverage is going to come from for the reforms,” said Jamie Kalven,
founder of the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit group which
advocates for police transparency.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about
Kalven's concerns.
Jonathan Smith, the Obama-appointed former chief of special
litigation in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said
he is confident that most agreements reached during the Obama era
will remain intact because they are overseen by judges who are
“committed to their implementation.”
In Cleveland, for instance, the judge who oversees the reform
agreement that Loomis’s union is objecting to recently rejected any
efforts to renegotiate it.
(Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)
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