ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Federal consent decrees can be a powerful legal tool to reform police departments. When former President Trump takes office again in January, the fate of investigations the Biden administration opened into police misconduct will become uncertain. NPR criminal justice reporter Meg Anderson is here to tell us more about the possible future of these agreements. Hey, Meg.
MEG ANDERSON, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Explain what a consent decree is and what it does.
ANDERSON: Yeah, so it's basically an improvement plan for troubled police departments. It typically starts with a federal investigation, and then the Justice Department, and usually a city, negotiate a legally binding plan for systemic reform. A federal monitor makes sure that that plan is then carried out.
The evidence, though, is kind of mixed on how effective they are. A main criticism is that these agreements can be very expensive to carry out, and they can stay in place for years. A judge decides whether a city has made the necessary changes. So Seattle, for instance, has been under its decree for more than a decade and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
SHAPIRO: And how have presidents tended to use consent decrees to change policing and police culture?
ANDERSON: So the Obama Justice Department really popularized them. And then Trump's Justice Department severely limited their use. They only opened one investigation during his time in office. Biden's DOJ has opened 12 investigations, including in Louisville, Minneapolis and Memphis, where police killed Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tyre Nichols, respectively. But none of those Biden investigations has been finalized into a decree.
SHAPIRO: Why would that be?
ANDERSON: So a senior justice official that I spoke with said that these investigations just take longer nowadays than they did during the Obama years. There's just so much more digital evidence today - tons of body-worn camera footage, for instance. Christy Lopez, though, says that doesn't totally explain it. She's a professor at Georgetown University, and under Obama, she was deputy chief in the DOJ division in charge of these decrees.
CHRISTY LOPEZ: There does not appear to have been the sense of urgency that we felt during the Obama administration. We really tried to get the investigations done within a year and the consent decrees done within a year after that. I just don't see that happening here.
SHAPIRO: Well, Biden's got a couple more months in office. Are they going to try to button these up or what?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So some legal experts I spoke to said that they don't think cities have much incentive to keep negotiating with the DOJ if they can kind of just wait it out. But, you know, we are seeing some evidence of movement from the DOJ. Last week, on Thursday, the Justice Department released findings in its investigation into Trenton, New Jersey's, police department, where it found widespread misconduct. And officials in Louisville and Minneapolis have been negotiating with the DOJ for months. So it is possible that those agreements will be finalized before Trump's inauguration. And the DOJ says to stay tuned on that and other matters.
SHAPIRO: And then looking ahead after the inauguration, if the Trump administration stops federal investigations into police misconduct, what happens then?
ANDERSON: Well, communities can push for reform on their own at the local level. I spoke with Justin Terrell about that. He's the executive director of the Minnesota Justice Research Center.
JUSTIN TERRELL: No one is coming to save you. If you're thinking the DOJ is going to save you, even if they negotiate an agreement, it is just another tool. And the tool is only as good as the person using it.
ANDERSON: So states can pursue police reform too. Minnesota, for instance, already has a consent decree with the city of Minneapolis. That - the state began to put that in place the last time that Trump was in office. But experts say that federal consent decrees send a strong message that no one is above the law, including the police.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR's Meg Anderson. Thank you.
ANDERSON: You're welcome.
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