WASHINGTON — Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has drastically limited the ability of federal law enforcement officials to use court-enforced agreements to overhaul local police departments accused of abuses and civil rights violations, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.
signed a memorandum on Wednesday before President Trump
fired him sharply curtailing the use of so-called consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create a road map of changes for law enforcement and other institutions.
ordered a review of the existing agreements, including with police departments in Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson, Mo., enacted amid a national outcry over the deaths of black men at the hands of officers.
since the first one was adopted in Pittsburgh more than two decades ago. The new guidelines push more of that responsibility onto state attorneys general and other local agencies.
By setting a higher bar for the deals, Mr. Sessions limited a tool that the Justice Department has used to help change policing practices nationwide.
ordered a review of the use of consent decrees to ensure that they “advance the safety and protection of the public.” He said that the pacts should also ensure that the police are safe and respected and that they should not interfere with recruiting efforts by the local police.
found rampant use of excessive force aimed at black and Latino people. Under Mr. Sessions, the Justice Department said the deal placed too many restrictions on Chicago’s police superintendent.
“When Jeff Sessions intervened in the locally negotiated consent decree in Chicago, it belied the love of federalism that he professes and uses to justify this effort to effectively end the use of consent decrees,” said Vanita Gupta, the chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
The agreements enacted after high-profile police killings in recent years would likely not exist if Mr. Sessions’s restrictions had been in place.
“The need for consent decrees and the oversight they guarantee,” she said, “has not disappeared.”
