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On 27 July 2016, United Nations special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association Maina Kiai issued a statement upon concluding a 17-day fact-finding visit to the United States in which, among other observations, he lauded a U.S. Department of Justice practice known as consent decrees: We'll delve into what consent decrees are and what they have to do with discrimination in law enforcement shortly. Suffice it to say regarding Mr. Kiai's statement that the two sentences above constitute the only mention of consent decrees in the entire 6,500-word document, but they didn't go unnoticed by Robert Romano, a writer for LifeZette (the news and lifestyle web site edited by talk radio host Laura Ingraham). His 4 August 2016 article, UN Backs Secret Obama Takeover of Police, led with the quoted passage, which Romano went on to interpret as follows: To put it less breathlessly, in this context a consent decree is a civil action pursued by the federal government against a local law enforcement agency to remedy violations of 42 U.S.C. § 14141, a section of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act prohibiting police conduct that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. The rationale and history behind the statute is summed up in an article on the web site of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: Concrete examples of the use of consent decrees include reforms forced on the Detroit Police Department between 2003 and 2014 after a spate of 47 fatal police shootings of civilians in five years, and on the Los Angeles Police Department between 2001 and 2013, after accusations that officers in an anti-gang unit had beaten and framed suspects. The Washington Post reported in 2015 that of the 67 DOJ civil rights investigations of law enforcement agencies conducted since the statute was enacted, 26 resulted in binding agreements between the agency and the federal government — more than half of those in the form of consent decrees — for the purpose of addressing systemic police misconduct. The Post also stated that more than half of the binding agreements since 1994 were imposed during the Obama administration, which brings us back to the allegation with which we started — that this somehow amounts to a secret Obama takeover of police. It doesn't. For one thing, the use of consent decrees started in the mid-1990s, soon after the the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was signed into law, and more than a decade before Obama was elected (nor, for that matter, has their use ever been secret). For another, it was Congress who gave the Justice Department this power by passing the 1994 legislation. And finally, these binding agreements — including consent decrees — are, by design, temporary, not permanent. They're not by any defensible stretch of the imagination a federalization or nationalization of local law enforcement entities. On the contrary, they're legal remedies implemented on a case-by-case basis to ensure local compliance with the civil rights laws of the land. The increase in the use of binding agreements between the DOJ and local law enforcement agencies during the Obama administration (there are currently eight such agreements now in force across the country) coincides with an increase in the use of deadly force by police, even as violent crime rates have gone down. Whether they're the best way to address police misconduct in the long run is an unsettled question, and up for debate. It can even be argued that — regardless of the rightness of the cause — the program is an example of overreach by the federal government, and ought not to be beefed up, contrary to what the United Nations rapporteur suggested, to cover more of the 18,000-plus law enforcement jurisdictions across the country. But an Obama takeover it is not.
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