Big question what Trump will do about U.S. probe of Chicago cops

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump described Chicago as a virtual Hellscape of violent crime, and suggested the cure was “tough police tactics.”

Those remarks take on special significance now that Trump is president-elect, and the U.S. Justice Department winds down a yearlong investigation of civil rights abuses by the Chicago Police Department.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week said he remained committed to the cause of reforming the nation’s second-largest police department, even if the Justice Department under Trump no longer pushes the aggressive police reform agenda it has pursued during President Barack Obama’s two terms.

Obama’s Justice Department has forced 19 departments across the U.S. into so-called consent decrees, court-monitored agreements that mandate sweeping reforms— more than the Justice Department under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined. Jonathan Smith, former head of the department’s division that handles police civil rights investigations, said this week he doubts that trend will continue under President Donald Trump.

“I am not optimistic at all,” said Smith, who left the Justice Department earlier this year for a job with the Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-base not-for-profit.

“Given what Trump said as a candidate about this views about policing and stop and frisk, and his allegations about a ‘war on police’ and some of the racial overtones … it seems unlikely that a Trump administration is going to move forward to pursue these kinds of investigations of patterns of civil rights abuses.”

Trump seemed to have defined his stance on civil rights investigations such as the one pending in Chicago during the second presidential debate, invoking the city’s surging violent crime rate and calling for more “law and order,” specifically more of the stop-and-frisk policing tactics that Justice Department investigations have consistently identified as unconstitutional and counterproductive.

“When you have 4,000 people killed in Chicago by guns from the beginning of the presidency of Barack Obama — his home town — you have to have stop-and-frisk. You need more police. You need a better community relations,” Trump said.

And despite protests over police shootings and use of excessive force that have roiled cities from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore, Trump in October told talk show host Bill O’Reilly police need only to get “tougher” to reduce crime, citing a conversation with an unnamed “very top” Chicago Police officer.

“How? By being very much tougher than they are right now. They’re right now not tough … but when I was in Chicago, I got to meet a couple of very top police,” Trump said. “I said, ‘How do you stop this? How do you stop this? If you were put in charge — to a specific person — do you think you could stop it?’ He said, ‘Mr. Trump, I’d be able to stop it in one week.’ And I believed him 100 percent.”

Congress approved legislation giving the Justice Department power to investigate police departments for patterns of civil rights abuses in 1994, during Bill Clinton’s first term and not long after videotape of Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police sparked riots in that city. In the years since, it has become clear that different administrations have used the law differently, said Stephen Rushin, a University of Alabama law school professor who has studied federal intervention into local police departments.

Obama’s Justice Department has launched 23 investigations of police departments, more than either Clinton or George W. Bush. More importantly, the department under Obama has entered into court-monitored agreements that mandate sweeping reforms with 19 of those departments, nearly double the number signed under Clinton and Bush combined. Bush in particular shied away from such deals, called consent decrees, which typically install a court-appointed team of monitors to track improvements, and which don’t end until a federal judge rules that department has met all of the benchmarks.

Data compiled by federal monitors indicates that federal intervention has been effective at addressing longstanding institutional problems that have been ignored or were simply too costly— politically or otherwise— to deal with, Rushin said.

“The reason we have the [federal] statute is because Congress recognized after Rodney King that local police departments won’t always fix themselves,” Rushin said. “[A consent decree] creates the conditions where success has to happen, because the federal court will not release the community until they are satisfied that what the department is doing is constitutional.”

Mayors whose departments have landed under federal monitoring deals have often chafed at the oversight. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu invited federal investigators to probe his department, but immediately appealed a consent decree negotiated with the federal government, citing the multimillion-dollar cost of hiring monitors and making the required reforms.

Emanuel has made reforming the Chicago Police Department a top priority in the months since the city grudgingly released the Laquan McDonald video, and as protesters blocked Michigan Avenue during the Black Friday start of the holiday shopping season last year and demonstrations have become standard at the scene of any police shooting. In the last year, he has announced plans to hire 1,000 additional police officers, offer additional use-of-force training, and issue Tasers and bodycameras to every patrol officer.

Lori Lightfoot, head of the Chicago’s Police Board and former chair of the Police Reform Task Force that issued a scathing review of the Chicago Police Department earlier this year, said that there is pressure on city leaders to make the sort of changes that the feds have imposed on other departments.

“The best course is for the city and department to take ownership of this issue itself,” said Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor. “Of course, circumstances have changed and that unknown gives a lot of people pause about the pace of reform. But I think this is a totally different historical context.”

“The actions that propelled the creation of the task force, civic outcry, the cameras everywhere, social media, those facts fundamentally change the context that we’re in. The president doesn’t dictate what happens on the ground with local police departments.”