The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that it will overhaul a six-year-old Obama-era program that had been put in place in the wake of police shootings and other controversial officer incidents.
In a
statement released Sept. 15, the DOJ said it would significantly scale back its Collaborative Reform Initiative, effectively putting an end to federal efforts to reform local police departments and improve police-community relations. Instead, the Justice Department will focus on providing more direct support to officers fighting gangs, drugs and violent crime as well as those dealing with protests.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that it will overhaul a six-year-old Obama-era program that had been put in place in the wake of police shootings and other controversial officer incidents.
In a
statement released Sept. 15, the DOJ said it would significantly scale back its Collaborative Reform Initiative, effectively putting an end to federal efforts to reform local police departments and improve police-community relations. Instead, the Justice Department will focus on providing more direct support to officers fighting gangs, drugs and violent crime as well as those dealing with protests.
The move is in line with a tougher law-and-order approach that President Donald Trump advocated during his campaign and in his first several months in office. Despite Trump's claim that violent crime is at near record highs, it
remains near historic lows.
The DOJ says those investigations often caused an “adversarial” relationship between the federal government and municipal law enforcement agencies. Instead, the new collaborative reform program will focus on “targeting and preventing crime,” “proactive policing” and “training for de-escalation, crisis intervention and citizen engagement to address violent crime.” The program will offer departments access to experts in gang suppression, disruption of drug markets and policing mass demonstrations.
The DOJ says the mission of the new program will be promoting “officer safety, officer morale and public respect for their work.”
The recent announcement by the DOJ is merely the latest effort by Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to roll back policing policies put in place under Obama.
The department in April tried unsuccessfully to delay a court-ordered consent decree in Baltimore. (A consent decree results from a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department against a municipal police agency. The court appoints a police monitor who’s responsible for making sure the policing agency follows the reform recommendations made by the Justice Department.) In Chicago, federal officials sought to convince city leaders to
pare down reforms that had been called for in the wake of the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald. That backfired, though, because in response, the Illinois state attorney general
sued the city to force it to implement far more aggressive reforms.
Earlier this month, the DOJ halted an ongoing review of the police department in Milwaukee. Police Chief Edward Flynn had sought the department's help rebuilding community relations after federal prosecutors declined to file charges against the officer who shot and killed Dontre Hamilton in 2014. A
draft report from the DOJ review had called on Milwaukee police to establish an independent auditor, hire a more diverse force and implement stricter behavior policies for officers.
Those and other reforms were stopped by the Justice Department's recent announcement. Instead, Milwaukee police will receive training on how to reduce crime.
I can't take you seriously dude...you literally just repeated the exact same thing I said...
