Targeting the Police

The Holder Justice Department declares open season on big city police departments

Jan 31, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 19 • By HEATHER MAC DONALD

In 2000, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration slapped the Los Angeles Police Department with federal oversight. A 1994 law gives the Justice Department the authority to seek control of police agencies that have engaged in a “pattern or practice” of constitutional violations. Justice’s attorneys never uncovered any systemic constitutional abuses in the LAPD as required by the 1994 law, despite having commandeered hundreds of thousands of documents (and having lost 10 boxes of sensitive records). Nevertheless, for the next decade the LAPD would operate under a draconian federal “consent decree”—a nominally consensual agreement overseen by a court—governing nearly every aspect of its operations, at a cost of over $100 million in contracting fees and in manpower diverted to mindless paper-pushing. 

The deputy attorney general who forced federal control on the LAPD in 2000 was none other than Eric Holder, who now presides over a Justice Department determined to make the Los Angeles consent decree the model for its future oversight of police departments. The current assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas Perez, told a conference of police chiefs in June 2010 that the Justice Department would be pursuing “pattern or practice” takeovers of police departments much more aggressively than the Bush administration, eschewing negotiation in favor of hardball tactics seeking immediate federal control. Perez has hired nine additional attorneys to beef up his division’s search for alleged police agency racism and to sue agencies that don’t capitulate to federal demands. Read full Article