The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is not in a consent decree, but it is under a court-appointed monitor due to the judge’s ruling in the long-running Melendres racial profiling case that goes back to the time of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It’s true that consent decrees can be costly and they can take a long time. But, Rachel Marshall says, based on her research into how these work across the country, they are effective.
Rachel Marshall is the executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. They aim to bring more voices to table when it comes to police accountability and oversight — including creating a nationwide network of states' attorneys general to encourage them to take leading roles in this realm.
She gave The Show an overview of what they’ve seen when it comes to consent decrees.
Full conversation
RACHEL MARSHALL: We've seen that consent decrees can really be powerful in terms of effecting real change within police departments. And just to give an example in Chicago, the state Attorney General Lisa Madigan, former Attorney General, Lisa Madigan sued the Chicago Police Department following the killing of Laquan McDonald and a finding by the Department of Justice federally of systemic misconduct by the Chicago Police Department, including racially disparate policing practices and widespread use of excessive force. And the DOJ nonetheless did not pursue a consent decree following the report which came out a week before President Trump took office. And under President Trump's administration, the department made clear it was not going to pursue a consent decree.
So, Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued the Chicago Police Department herself in federal court and they resulted in a really impactful consent decree that remains in effect today. And that implemented changes like requiring officers to log every time they dropped their weapon to report their use of force data on a monthly basis, improving officer accountability procedures and other things like that. But I think another piece of the picture that's so important and that is such a good illustration based on what happened in Chicago is the incredible level of community engagement that Attorney General Madigan included in the process.
She had a series of different round tables across the city where they really heard from voices of people in the city about how the police department had impacted them. And those voices were all included in the forming of the consent decree and really went really far in being able to create both change, but also buy in from the community whose voices were being included and respected in not a tokenizing way, but in a really meaningful substantive way to effect that change in the police department.
LAUREN GILGER: So there's an example where it seems to have been successful. Are there examples in cities where it has been less successful and costly?
MARSHALL: Well, certainly consent decrees have their limitations. We know that after a consent decree concludes there have been instances of backsliding. So one example that comes to mind is Pittsburgh, where there was a consent decree that lasted eight years and was really praised as a model of progressive policing but expired in 2002. And afterwards, we did see that there were many violent incidents including leading to many about $5 million worth of settlements for claims against officers in just a five-year period, about eight years after the consent decree expired.
So we know that it can sometimes be challenging to continue to maintain that progress. The other limitation of consent decrees is that they can take time in order to develop and so they can take time to therefore effect the changes that they are seeking. And as you mentioned, they can be expensive, but I think it's important to put that in context. So for example, I just mentioned Chicago that consent decree cost the city over $25 million. However, those consent decrees often cost less than what a city would otherwise pay out from, from all the different suits that come about from officer misconduct.
So looking at Chicago again, Chicago has paid over $700 million in police misconduct claims in a nine year period. So it's really important to contextualize that cost and realize that it's that oftentimes the cost can be much higher without a consent decree. But overall the impact of consent decrees has really been powerful. We've seen examples of that time and again in Seattle, for example, there was a 2012 federal consent decree following an investigation by the DOJ under the Obama administration.
And that investigation found a pattern of excessive force, racially discriminatory policing. And because of the consent decree, there were crisis intervention programs that emerged to respond to behavioral health crises and there was a reported 60% reduction in use of serious force. So that's pretty powerful change that we can see happening as a result of consent decrees.
GILGER: So city officials here in Phoenix following this DOJ report that came out just a month or two ago seem very reticent to enter into a consent decree. They have cited costs, the amount of time it can often take as you mentioned, but they've also said that there are mixed results in all of this. I wonder when a city or you know, a jurisdiction decides not to enter into a consent decree? What do those cases look like? What are the other options?
MARSHALL: There are other options of other kinds of alternatives to consent decree that we've seen be successful. One example is there can be settlement agreements that are not court enforced that they're reached outside of court. An example that comes to mind of a successful settlement agreement was one that was recently reached last year in New York State where the Attorney General Letitia James had sued the New York Police Department for its response to how it handled protesters in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd and a settlement reached in 2023 really aimed to protect the public from some of those practices that the police were using in response to protests and making sure that they respected the first amendment rights of protests and their safety.
And that settlement agreement required the New York Police Department to modify practices and created a framework for how the police could respond to protests. But instead of having a consent decree involved and a federal monitor, it's overseen by a committee that includes First Amendment lawyers, civil rights lawyers, as well as police union representatives and members of the Attorney General's Office.
So that's, that's another model but typically settled and, and that's been successful in New York. But oftentimes settlement agreements are better suited for more minor problems in a police department. Whereas consent decrees really go to more systemic widespread problems like the kinds that we've seen in Phoenix identified in the DOJ report.
