The department asked for more time to see how the proposed changes might conflict with the aggressive crime-fighting approach new Attorney General Jeff Sessions favors.
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“It’s our belief that the court, which has jurisdiction over this matter, has no obligation to engage in the petty politics of Donald Trump or Jeff Sessions”, Michael Nelson said. And he doesn’t issue modest orders.
Last week, East Haven Police Chief Ed Lennon and Lt. David Emerman received a “Community Policing Commendation Award” at the Inaugural Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in Community Policing.
The Baltimore Police Department announced it had worked out a tentative consent decree with the Justice Department just days before Trump took office.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh has said her city will proceed with promised reform whether the Justice Department ultimately follows through or not.
Bredar, a former federal public defender overseeing the pending agreement, pointed out that the United States government had already signed it following an extensive civil rights investigation into Baltimore’s police force. Mayor, thanks so much for being with us. It requires the Police Department to make costly upgrades. The announcement was widely rebuked by police reform advocates.
John Gore, deputy assistant attorney general in the agency’s Civil Rights Division, said the department “certainly agrees that there is a critical need for police reform” in Baltimore, but that reform is “really the job of local officials”. They looked at some of the technology needs of the police department, the lack of body cameras, the lack of straps inside of vans.
MARTIN: So you mentioned this pause.
The Thursday hearing was scheduled in February and asks for public feedback on a so-called consent decree between Baltimore and the Justice Department. Now all of this is being delayed. “It sounds as if the intention of the mayor was to do this, consent decree or no consent decree. Like I always say, I want Officer Friendly to come back”, Johnson said. But what we do know is that the cost to creating trust between the police department and the community is unmeasurable.
Sessions, an Alabama Republican who cultivated a tough-on-crime reputation during 20 years in the Senate, has repeatedly expressed concern that lengthy investigations of a police department can malign an entire agency.
“It is very important that our community as well as the police, our fire, all of our local officials have great relationships with the community”.
Yet the implicit meaning seems to be that the consent decrees weren’t responding to genuine problems with police procedures.
The reforms haven’t been cheap for the city, and the federal government isn’t footing the bill.
The decree calls for changes on how Baltimore officers should be trained and is the product of an Obama-era police brutality investigation into the department following the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray. This case was negotiated, and the city and Justice Department came to the conclusion that this was the best thing to do.
As the Baltimore Sun noted, Judge Bredar’s ruling seemed primarily focused on the timing of the request, and eschewed the main thrust of the DOJ’s broader request to re-assess the decree.
PUGH: The federal dollars will go away. After all, those agreements were necessitated by systemic police abuses targeting minority communities.
Sessions’ memo, dated Friday, said local control and accountability “are necessary for effective local policing”. For those that are fluent in White Man Talk, what Trump and Sessions mean is that they will intensify mass Black incarceration by continuing the subterfuge of the War on Drugs. In what seemed like a reference to Sessions’ skepticism of consent decrees, a lawyer representing Baltimore said on Thursday that he wasn’t sure people were actually looking at the text of the consent decree, which include provisions for amendments. “But if you don’t think that impacts the officer’s behavior, you’re naive”. Polling showed residents’ attitudes toward police have improved greatly.
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“We want to move forward”, Pugh told The Associated Press.
