Putting handcuffs on good cops is a bad idea. For too long, the U.S. Department of Justice has forced some American cities to pay wealthy private lawyers to oversee their police departments rather than the officials elected by citizens to do that job. It’s time to curb this pernicious trend and President Trump should remove those restraints.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 allowed the Justice Department to seek federal oversight of law enforcement agencies engaged in alleged patterns of unconstitutional conduct. Since then, numerous cities have been forced into signing “consent decrees” that essentially turn over management of their police to outside “monitors” who too often lack a deep and even-handed understanding of police work. Worse yet, many don’t even live in the community they oversee.
In too many cases, these federal bullying tactics are tinged with extremist politics. For example, Louisville, Kentucky just signed a consent decree. It followed a 2020 incident when police officers serving a lawful warrant were shot at by a man in the house they were searching. An officer was hit. The shooter’s girlfriend — a woman named Breonna Taylor, who was standing near the gunman — was tragically killed when officers returned fire.
Even though the Kentucky attorney general, David Cameron, announced grand jury findings that the officers were justified in their use of force, Joe Biden’s Justice Department, nevertheless used a warped view of that situation and a handful of others as a pretext to allege a pattern of racism in the Louisville Metro Police De
Other cities — most of which are already facing budgetary shortfalls — are also paying for consent decrees, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Minneapoli
The Negative Impact of Consent Decrees in Ohio
In Ohio, where I serve as an elected county prosecutor, Cleveland has endured such a consent decree for nearly a decade. The agreement demands that local police change how they conduct searches and seizures, and how they interact with people.
But it’s had little positive effect. Even the Cleveland City Council president said it hasn
How expensive? Even the far-left ACLU admits the cost may be $11 million per year, and the current monitors charge as much as $750 an hour. The average Clevelander makes about $30 an hour. You do the math.
Who are these richly rewarded monitors? If you guessed they’re all local folks who want to help their hometown, you’re wrong. It’s 19 people, and only a few are from Cleveland. Several are lawyers from a gold-plated Washington, D.C. law firm led by Karl Racine.
Racine has endorsed politicians who want to defund the police. He also helped anti-police rioters hide their arrest records from the public. He’s no friend to hard-working police officers who do their job and follow the law.
In a recent report, Racine and his decadent D.C. comrades explained that: “We will be establishing additional priorities … to help us understand exactly what has occurred over the lifespan of this Consent Decree so that we know what is working well and what needs to be fixed.”
After a decade and millions of dollars spent, the monitors should already know what’s working and what needs to be fixed. Citizens and police in Cleveland deserve better.
In a few rare instances, a consent decree might be appropriate. But — like nearly all government regulation that has the potential to be punitive and oppressive — it should be limited in scope, short in duration, and staffed only by local people with genuine insight into police work. That’s true everywhere in America and it’s particularly true in Cleveland.
It’s time to end the Cleveland consent decree, give taxpayers relief, and remove the handcuffs from the police who do their job well. It’s also time for the incoming Justice Department leaders to wind down those consent decrees that are expensive and ineffective. I’m confident that President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi are the right people to make that happen.
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