Some fear police reform will stall under Trump

But under President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, U.S. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the department’s role as a civil rights watchdog could drastically change, legal and law enforcement experts say.

Sessions, a former U.S. attorney and Alabama attorney general, has indicated through his statements that he is against consent decrees and opposes the federal government getting involved in local police departments’ affairs.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Sessions would take over the Justice Department at a time of extraordinary scrutiny of police for their use of deadly force, especially against unarmed people of color. Some police academies and departments have taken heed, shifting the focus of their training to emphasize using communication, before weapons, to de-escalate a dangerous situation. President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing endorsed the philosophy last year, recommending that police agencies “should embrace a guardian — rather than a warrior — mindset to build trust and legitimacy both within agencies and with the public.”

Civil rights advocates worry that a Trump presidency could reverse the momentum. On the campaign trail, Trump painted a chaotic picture of an America in need of stronger law enforcement agencies. He often repeated, “The war on our police must end.”

But how the president-elect might influence local police practices, and how that would impact New Mexico, remains unclear. Except for his pledges to crack down on illegal immigration, Trump has been short on specifics on law enforcement issues.

“I don’t think there’s been an overall tenor of how to do things,” Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, said of how previous presidents have shaped local policing. “But what President Trump is going to do is anyone’s call. No really knows, obviously.”

While presidents don’t have direct authority over police departments, federal programs and funding that local law enforcement agencies depend on can impact the way they police.

The Community Oriented Polices Services program enacted under President Bill Clinton, for example, claimed to have put 100,000 additional police officers on the ground through nearly $10 billion in grants between 1994 and 2000, a period of sharp declines in crime in the U.S., though debate continues over how many officers were actually hired and what impact the program had on crime reduction.

The Bush administration increased the flow of the U.S. Department of Defense’s controversial 1033 program, which provided surplus military equipment to local police departments — from sleeping bags to mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs — during heightened fear of terror after the 9/11 attacks.

Some blame the program, at least in part, for the steady militarization of police departments around the nation. The program came under harsh light in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 when police officers clad in combat gear and hoisting military-style machine guns faced off against protesters after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white officer.

In response, Obama created the Task Force for 21st Century Policing, tasked with recommending ways to create positive relationships between police and their communities. Following the 11-member group’s recommendations, Obama scaled back the 1033 program, asking agencies to return some military equipment such as tanks and other tracked armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft and vehicles, firearms and ammunition measuring .50-caliber and larger, grenade launchers and bayonets.

But in courting the largest police union in the country, Trump told the Fraternal Order of Police that he supports the program and would fully restore it. “I will rescind the current executive order,” Trump told the union in a questionnaire.

In New Mexico, the top-ticket items that agencies received through the program include 20 MRAPs, 64 Humvees and three helicopters. Other items include 11 bomb-disposal units and 10 pairs of night-vision goggles.

Scaling back the 1033 program was just one way the Obama administration has influenced local police policies. The most prominent was through the use of consent decrees and civil rights lawsuits against police departments. Under Obama, the Justice Department opened 23 investigations into local police agencies and signed consent decrees with 14, though three of those were from investigations begun during the Bush administration.

That was a significant increase from the department’s eight years under President George W. Bush, in which it entered into three such agreements. The Clinton administration also entered into three consent decrees.

A statute in a federal 1994 crime bill gives the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division the authority to investigate law enforcement agencies and demand reforms under consent decrees, which have to be approved by a federal judge. The provision came as a result of the 1991 beating of Rodney King at the hands of four Los Angeles Police Department officers.

“In the last eight years, we’ve seen a rampant enforcement of this statute,” said Stephen Rushin, an assistant law professor at the University of Alabama.

Sessions has spoken against consent decrees. In an introduction Sessions wrote for an Alabama Policy Institute report in 2008, the senator described consent decrees as dangerous. “One of the most dangerous, and rarely discussed, exercises of raw power is the issuance of expansive court decrees,” he wrote. “Consent decrees have a profound effect on our legal system as they constitute an end run around the democratic process.”

Legal experts say consent decrees already in place should be enforced under a Trump administration because they are court-approved and a federal judge determines if the terms of the agreement are met by the law enforcement agency.

Still, the new administration could take a lax approach in ensuring the agreements are met.

“If an agency thinks or knows that the Department of Justice isn’t very interested in enforcing its existing consent decrees, then it may not put the time or effort or resources into meeting its obligations as fast as it would if it believed that the Department of Justice was keeping a close eye on it,” said Seth Stoughton, an assistant law professor at the University of South Carolina.

Celina Espinoza, an Albuquerque police department spokeswoman, said a Trump administration should have no effect on the department’s agreement with the Justice Department. She didn’t respond to a request for an interview with Chief Gorden Eden.

Detective Shaun Willoughby, president of the Albuquerque Police Officers Association, which endorsed Trump and is a defendant in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the police department, said he would like the incoming president to review all of the consent decrees, including the Albuquerque Police Department’s. Willoughby said the union doesn’t usually endorse presidential candidates, but in this case, he said Albuquerque police officers felt the Obama administration has an anti-police agenda.

“It was refreshing to have a candidate that supports law enforcement,” Willoughby said. “We didn’t endorse him because we’re under a DOJ agreement, but I would hope a Trump administration would review all these agreements from an unbiased, non-anti-police view.”

Under Obama, a lot of officers across the country and in New Mexico have felt they have been unjustly scrutinized and “been made out to be public enemy No. 1,” Willoughby said.

That’s a sentiment experts say is not uncommon among officers.

“I think that’s a widely shared, but certainly not universal, sentiment. Officers feel critiqued and embattled by a public that doesn’t understand the reality of policing,” Stoughton said. “And officers want to be left alone to do their jobs the way they feel those jobs need to be done.”

Advocates of police reform, however, want Albuquerque police to continue implementing the changes agreed upon.

“Regardless of which presidential administration is in power, the city of Albuquerque has requirements to meet the terms in that agreement,” said Steve Allen, policy director for the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a spokesman for APD Forward, an advocacy group seeking police reforms in Albuquerque.“It’s going to be a difficult and a long process, but that’s the obligation they signed up for.”

After the Justice Department released a scathing report in April 2014 criticizing the Albuquerque department for a pattern of police brutality and unnecessary use of deadly force, New Mexico still leads the nation in the rate of officers fatally shooting people.

Law enforcement officers in New Mexico have fatally shot 41 people since January 2015, more people per capita than police in any other state, according to The New Mexican’s analysis of data maintained by The Washington Post.

Alpert, the criminology professor, said police reform policies already started under the Obama administration would be hard to undo, including changing from military-style police training to community policing. In New Mexico, the state Law Enforcement Academy under Jack Jones, its former director, had implemented an officer survival lesson plan that taught cadets to have a “warrior mindset.”

“Police reform isn’t done by the Justice Department. Police reform is championed by progressive chiefs and progressive local politicians,” Alpert said. “And I don’t see police becoming more of a warrior. I think Trump has to not only win the police over, but he’ll have to win the communities over, so he has a balancing test to perform. He just can’t go back to the days of open fire and the warrior mentality, if you will. We have come so far from there, it would be shocking if we went back.”

Another point that would remain unclear under a Trump administration is if his possible new U.S. attorney for New Mexico would continue the investigation into allegations that Albuquerque police officers altered body camera videos. The investigation came about after a former police department records custodian had claimed that officers had altered and deleted body camera video from police shootings.

“Regardless of the change of president, it’s urgent that the investigation happen in a timely manner and that we get answers quickly,” Allen said.

A Trump presidency also could mean less or no federal money to police agencies in cities like Santa Fe with sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants. In the past five years, the Santa Fe Police Department has received an average of $328,318 annually in direct funding from the federal government. The money has been used in various ways, including paying for drug operations and bulletproof vests. Hundreds of thousands more dollars have poured into the city police department through state and federal government partnerships.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to cut federal dollars to sanctuary cities on day one of his administration. Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales has vowed on national television to keep the city’s policies in place despite the threat.

“We have no idea what Mr. Trump plans to do at this point, so it’s impossible to say exactly what could happen,” said Greg Gurulé, a Santa Fe police spokesman. “It also seems like the president-elect is waffling on some of his campaign promises, and that makes it even harder to anticipate what may happen in the years ahead because of the city’s sanctuary policy.”

Santa Fe Police Chief Patrick Gallagher agreed.

“We’re going to take a wait-and-see approach, so we can make more informed decisions,” he said.

The Santa Fe New Mexican is a sister-paper of The Taos News. Contact Uriel Garcia at 505-986-3062 or ugarcia@sfnewmexican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ujohnnyg.