The Department of Justice collaborative review of the Memphis Department of Police Services is dead in the water almost a year after it was announced with much fanfare.
MPD has entered a downsized deal with the office of Community Oriented Policing Services as the Trump administration has neutered the DOJ's efforts to improve community policing in Memphis and 14 other U.S. cities.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month declared that the COPS office would pull back its Collaborative Reform Initiative for Technical Assistance (CRI-TA) program which works with law enforcement agencies to recommend ways the agencies could improve policing practices and police-community relations.
MPD has entered a downsized deal with the office of Community Oriented Policing Services as the Trump administration has neutered the DOJ's efforts to improve community policing in Memphis and 14 other U.S. cities.
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| AG Sessions: "Course Correction" New York Daily News Photo |
Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month declared that the COPS office would pull back its Collaborative Reform Initiative for Technical Assistance (CRI-TA) program which works with law enforcement agencies to recommend ways the agencies could improve policing practices and police-community relations.
What's left of the COPS office work with MPD is an offer of "technical assistance" -- basically a menu of training that MPD may request -- such as police response to mass demonstrations, officer safety and wellness and problem-solving techniques.
What's gone are the findings and recommendations that COPS was to present to MPD, then to follow through with monitoring and assistance during a two-year project. To prepare that report, the COPS team had invested hundreds of hours, including trips to Memphis. Time also was devoted to the project by MPD and community organizations that had met with COPS.
No such reports will be released to the public now, confirmed Valerie Jordan of the COPS communications division. "We're not going to give out that information," Jordan said.
What's gone are the findings and recommendations that COPS was to present to MPD, then to follow through with monitoring and assistance during a two-year project. To prepare that report, the COPS team had invested hundreds of hours, including trips to Memphis. Time also was devoted to the project by MPD and community organizations that had met with COPS.
No such reports will be released to the public now, confirmed Valerie Jordan of the COPS communications division. "We're not going to give out that information," Jordan said.
SHIFTING INTO
REVERSE, SEMANTICS AND ALL
Director of Police Services Michael Rallings on Oct. 12
signed a whittled-down "Memorandum of Understanding" between the COPS office and the
Memphis Police Department for the “Collaborative Reform Initiative for
Technical Assistance.” This document “supersedes
and replaces” the "Memorandum of Agreement" executed by Mayor Jim Strickland on March 3, 2017.
Notably, the city of Memphis itself is not a party to this deal as the new
MOU is not signed by Strickland.
Both documents are linked here:
Comparing the two documents simplistically -- beyond one being an "agreement" and the other an "understanding" -- the March deal has a list of 17 commitments on the part of the city, and the October "understanding" has five.
Notable changes include:
·
The earlier agreement provided for “full access” to
records, and the new one provides records “as appropriate and needed.”
·
The city’s pledge of “willingness to implement the agreed
upon reform recommendations, which will be based on professional standards,
best practices, research...and the President’s Task Force on 21st
Century Policing” has been scratched entirely.
·
The city’s agreement that “all reports will be publicly
presented and widely disseminated by the COPS office” has been scratched.
You get the idea.
In the new "understanding," the COPS office committed to the
city to “complete all technical assistance efforts by August 2018.”
In a Sept. 15 DOJ press release Sessions said the community policing office needed a “course
correction” and should defer to local law enforcement to run and police their
own shops.
“Changes to this program will fulfill my commitment to
respect local control and accountability, while still delivering important
tailored resources to local law enforcement to fight violent crime,” Sessions
said. “This is a course correction to ensure that resources go to agencies that
require assistance rather than expensive wide-ranging investigative assessments
that go beyond the scope of technical assistance and support.”
WHY DID THE CITY HIDE THIS?
MONTHS OF WORK
DOWN THE DRAIN
Our story came about after
years of following this subject for our doc, Who Will Watch the Watchers? and
after cultivating off-the-record sources who will only talk on background.
Local reporters don't have depth on this -- but they are not in position to,
having to scramble from one shooting, to a car pileup, to whatever. Local
media got it from us, because we wanted them to have it, because we thought the
public should know.
The city could have put out
this information on Sept. 15, but they didn’t. Why not? Was it a comfortable reflex
to hide information from the public? This was not even a negative story about
Memphis; it was not the city’s or MPD’s fault.
But, the media got it wrong,
sort of, and Strickland had it wrong, totally.
Strickland was interviewed by
WMC and Local24 and told WMC, "I don't believe the program has
changed. I believe the wording of the agreement has changed."
Well, words matter. Is
Strickland like Trump, he has the best words?
The program is dead,
over, muerte, no mas. It's not like a change; it's dead. Reporters
did not challenge Strickland’s spin.
The city can request
training from DOJ, and some good could still come from that. But there will be
no review, no report, nothing that citizens could have learned from and used. What’s
that word, oh, yeah, transparency.
We talked with Edward Stanton
III, former U.S attorney for the Western District of Tennessee. Stanton was key
to getting this started as he recommended the program to Rallings while
the DOJ was investigating the shooting of Darrius Stewart by a Memphis officer.
"There were going to be
boots on the ground, resources, funding," said a disappointed Stanton, who
is passionate about the need for police accountability to improve community
relations. Stanton was another casualty of the presidential election Nov. 8,
and he resigned in February to join a Memphis law firm.
The
community was "buying in" and the city and the police chief were
"all in when I was there," Stanton said.
The next major step in the COPS office work with Memphis would
have been its initial assessment of findings and recommendations. COPS
team members had made several trips to Memphis, including public listening sessions last year, and they were in Memphis during the summer. For instance, in July they went on police ride-alongs
and met with the Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board and community
organizations such as the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center and People for the
Enforcement of Rape Laws.
The COPS crew was tight-lipped and would not publicly comment
on their work.
When goaded into standing up and saying something at the July
CLERB meeting, Keenon James of the COPS office blandly offered, “We appreciate
the opportunity to be here and be involved in the great things going on in the
city of Memphis.”
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| Keenon James of COPS team at July CLERB meeting |
That body of work is mostly down the drain. The COPS team
would have made one more trip to Memphis before compiling their report. The knowledge that team members gained of MPD and the community -- including favorite barbecue eateries -- now down-shifts to background for any
efforts going forward. Potentially, key objectives of the COPS assessment
as released in May can carry over in the form of training and
assistance in use of force, citizen complaints, citizen oversight of police and
officer accountability.
COMMUNITY
POLICING SUMMER
While the DOJ folks were in town, however, it seemed as
though the city and the police department were striving to be on their best
behavior.
Mayor Strickland’s city-paid attorney Alan Crone made an
unprecedented appearance at the July CLERB meeting which was attended by three
members of DOJ staff. Crone made a lengthy speech, waxing and waning about the
awesomeness of police oversight in Memphis and how the city and police were
embracing it. (Locals in the room knew better, and we doubt the target audience bought it, either.)
Police chief Rallings made himself more visible, attending
community meetings and stepping up public appearances. In fact, on Saturday June 10 Rallings
attended four community events, with an MPD photographer in tow to post photos on the police Facebook page. Events included “Touch a Truck” downtown, where kids
could play on fire trucks and police vehicles, and Reginald Johnson’s “Stop the
Gun Violence” event in Frayser in honor of his son Samuel, whose murder down
the street from his home is still an open case.
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| Police chief pressing the flesh at Reginald Johnson's Stop the Violence Event |
When citizens opposed to Wal-Mart’s cheap-labor practices
and the company’s investments in private prisons had widely posted on Facebook
their intentions to have a “salsa dance party” inside a Memphis Wal-Mart, police and
Wal-Mart management were waiting for them. Police gathered inside and outside
the store and were fortified with about 16 cruisers in the parking lot.
Wal-Mart store management was on the phone with corporate
headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and they were told to get the police to
“drag them out of there and arrest them, and anybody with them, and charge them
up.” While police shooed the band of
salsa-playing “unshoppers” out of the store as they shouted, “boycott
Wal-Mart,” no arrests were made.
In the Wal-Mart parking lot after the action was over, one of the organizers told police, "Thank you for not arresting us."
MPD rarely releases body-worn camera or in-car video footage. But police provided to local media a video clip of an officer's encounter with an African-American attorney who had complained he was racially profiled at a traffic stop in July.
In the Wal-Mart parking lot after the action was over, one of the organizers told police, "Thank you for not arresting us."
MPD rarely releases body-worn camera or in-car video footage. But police provided to local media a video clip of an officer's encounter with an African-American attorney who had complained he was racially profiled at a traffic stop in July.
Ah, those were the days. It was Community
Policing Summer in Memphis.
POLICING THE
POLICE
Delays and stops and starts plagued the COPS efforts with
Memphis even before this “significant change,” as the DOJ put it. After announcing the collaborative review on
Oct. 26, 2016, the COPS office on March 3, 2017, put out a release saying the
agreement with the city of Memphis was over because the city had not entered
into a Memorandum of Agreement after all that time. Strickland’s PR rep said she
was “shocked” at the announcement. Before the day was over, DOJ said it was a
misunderstanding, and things were supposedly back on track after Strickland
signed the agreement and dated it March 3.
Rallings had signed it on Jan. 13.
Rallings and the city had invited the DOJ’s COPS office to
work with MPD to make assessments and recommendations about the department. The “collaborative reviews” are voluntary,
and with many cities their requests of DOJ have followed infamous police killings
of unarmed men, such as Philando Castile, shot and killed by a St. Anthony, MN,
officer in July 2016. In Memphis,
officer Connor Schilling shot and killed unarmed backseat passenger Darrius
Stewart July 17, 2015, after a traffic stop. Of 16 cities and police departments which began collaborative reviews with COPS between 2012 and 2016, St. Anthony's was the last one, announced on Dec. 15, 2016. Only one has been completed, Las Vegas, which was the first such effort undertaken after an extreme number of officer-involved shootings.
In the March agreement with the city of Memphis, the last
item – item 17 – states, “Acknowledgement that participation in the CRI-TA
program does not preclude any future investigations into the patterns and
practices of the law enforcement agency by the DOJ Civil Rights Division.”
During the Obama administration, there were 25 “patterns
and practices” investigations by the Civil Rights Division into law enforcement
agencies – like with the voluntary reviews, many investigations were sparked by
public outrage over police killings of unarmed young, black men, such as
Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Most
of those investigations ended in consent decrees, in which the cities agreed
to take certain reform measures and to pay for monitoring of their
progress.
As Memphis and other cities jumped on board the COPS collaborative review train, we speculated that their motivation in part was exactly what "item 17" referenced: It was to hedge against a patterns and practices investigation. Memphis announced its participation just days before Trump was elected. We are left to wonder, Would the city and MPD have taken that step if they knew Hillary Clinton would not be around to continue President Obama's policies?
As Memphis and other cities jumped on board the COPS collaborative review train, we speculated that their motivation in part was exactly what "item 17" referenced: It was to hedge against a patterns and practices investigation. Memphis announced its participation just days before Trump was elected. We are left to wonder, Would the city and MPD have taken that step if they knew Hillary Clinton would not be around to continue President Obama's policies?
After the collaboration between COPS and MPD was announced last October, the COPS team came to Memphis and held two public listening
sessions at which citizens aired their grievances with local
policing in a setting absent of any uniformed law enforcement. The consensus among citizens at the Nov. 30
meeting, which we filmed and posted, was that there is no realistic way to
complain about the police.
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| COPS team leader George Fachner listens to citizens Nov. 30, 2016 |
The Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board was revived by
City Council ordinance in November, 2015, after having been quietly disbanded
by Mayor A.C. Wharton in August, 2011. But the citizen oversight body can only
make recommendations to the police chief and has no real authority other than
to conduct monthly, public meetings and hear complaints from aggrieved
citizens. Police director Rallings has
rejected every single recommendation thus far from CLERB.
SHUT DOWN BY
TRUMP-SESSIONS
In contrast to the pace of patterns and practices investigations launched during the Obama administration, expect none to happen
under Trump. In fact, Sessions has said
DOJ would review existing consent decrees with cities and seek to roll them
back if possible. The DOJ under
Trump-Sessions has been loudly all about the “law and order” rhetoric of longer
sentences and stricter enforcement over Obama-era efforts to support community
policing and to slow private prisons and mass incarceration. Sessions views the COPS office as adversarial to law enforcement, which should not be subjected to a federal watchdog.
Noble Wray was the highest ranking DOJ official at the
city’s press conference announcement Oct. 26. The presidential election was held Nov. 8. Wray resigned from the
DOJ before the week was out.
Funding is expected to be cut to the COPS office and the Civil Rights Division – although COPS has provided many resources to law enforcement, boasting that it has funded 127,000 officer positions across about 13,000 law enforcement agencies.
"We haven't gotten anything definite," the DOJ's Jordan said about possible funding and cuts. "We are staying with what they call a continuing resolution to keep going, until we find out something."
No collaborative reviews have been undertaken in 2017, and the last report on the subject of collaborative review was published Jan. 17, three days before the presidential inauguration and as Obama DOJ appointees such as Civil Rights Division head Vanita Gupta cleaned out their offices.
Funding is expected to be cut to the COPS office and the Civil Rights Division – although COPS has provided many resources to law enforcement, boasting that it has funded 127,000 officer positions across about 13,000 law enforcement agencies.
"We haven't gotten anything definite," the DOJ's Jordan said about possible funding and cuts. "We are staying with what they call a continuing resolution to keep going, until we find out something."
No collaborative reviews have been undertaken in 2017, and the last report on the subject of collaborative review was published Jan. 17, three days before the presidential inauguration and as Obama DOJ appointees such as Civil Rights Division head Vanita Gupta cleaned out their offices.
When the COPS team held its last listening session in
November, we asked their PR rep Mary Brandenberger what was in store for them
under Trump as many DOJ staffers were polishing up their resumes.
“I wish somebody would tell me,” said Brandenberger.
This spring, Branderberger apparently caught a version of Trump's most obnoxious line. Last we heard she is no longer with the COPS office.
This spring, Branderberger apparently caught a version of Trump's most obnoxious line. Last we heard she is no longer with the COPS office.
OUR EARLIER
REPORTS
Here are links to our earlier reports and stories from
various media and researchers:
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