The Justice Department’s findings against Phoenix police announced Thursday won’t change the mindset of many.
No community activists and police critics. Not local law enforcement, their supporters and opponents of the federal government.
The findings, which were almost three years in the making, also do not provide much clarity about the future.
Actually, we’ll have to hurry up and wait a little longer.
Not just for the city of Phoenix to review the DOJ report – to check the facts and perhaps challenge specific points.
But it is up to both sides to negotiate, debate and decide how to move forward with a resolution.
Good luck figuring out a timetable.
DOJ indicates it still wants a consent decree
Even if Phoenix officials make a decision and agree to a restrictive consent decree, which means a court-appointed monitor and years of oversight costing tens of millions of dollars, it could still be a long time before a final agreement is reached.
Louisville, which agreed to federal oversight without a fight, held its final meeting this week for public input on its consent decree — more than 15 months after DOJ released its critical findings about the Louisville Police Department.
The findings regarding the Phoenix Police Department suggest that the Justice Department will aggressively pursue a similar settlement.
Like other departments before it, the Phoenix Police Department was found by DOJ to have engaged in a pattern or practice of civil rights violations, including:
Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke described the police’s problems as “serious” and “systematic.”
“Long-term dysfunction,” she said at another point.
Phoenix uses violence first, and that’s a problem
Particularly damning is DOJ’s claim that the Phoenix Police Department has a culture of teaching officers that “escalation (of force) is de-escalation.”
That is, the Phoenix Police Department, through training and supervision, encourages officers to use force first, even when the circumstances do not call for it, to resolve situations quickly or to avoid the potential need for more force.
DOJ alleges that this practice unnecessarily increases safety risks – for police officers and the people they interact with – and, even more troubling, that it leads to widespread unlawful use of force.
DOJ report: Calls out both black leaders and police
“Officers use unjustified, less-lethal force against people in handcuffs, people in crisis, and people accused of low-level crimes,” the report said. “Officers rely on less-lethal force to resolve situations quickly, often when no force is necessary and without any meaningful attempt to de-escalate.”
The finding of excessive or unjustified force illustrates why, as much as Phoenix officials would like to, the city is unlikely to gain independent control over remediating civil rights violations.
The Justice Department essentially argues that the Phoenix Police Department should not be charged with overseeing the reforms on their own, as they have been blind to their shortcomings for years and some of the recently adopted policy changes have not even been put into practice, let alone have proven effective.
Whatever happens, expect a long fight for the police
The kind of heavy lift DOJ wants just to tighten the use of force, from training and surveillance assessment to data collection and accountability for violations, requires near-independent oversight.
In a brief question and answer session with reporters following the announced findings, Assistant Attorney General Clarke said on three separate occasions that a consent decree is the tool the Justice Department has relied on to remedy unconstitutional policing.
Consent decrees, she said, provide “the strong medicine needed to address the serious violations identified (here).”
More telling, Clarke said the DOJ’s findings show that “we cannot rely on police to police themselves.”
It could be that in the coming days, city officials will step up to debunk some of the damning claims made by Clarke and the Justice Department.
Either way, it all points to a long road ahead for Phoenix.
Contact Abe Kwok at akwok@azcentral.com. On X, formerly Twitter: @abekwok.
This article originally appeared in the Arizona Republic: Phoenix faces a long fight with DOJ over who controls police reform
