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Politics|Memphis Says It Will Not Yet Agree to Federal Oversight of Police Department
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/us/politics/memphis-justice-oversight-police-department.html
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The city’s mayor reiterated his reluctance to enter a consent decree after the Justice Department found a pattern of discrimination and excessive force by its officers.
Emily Cochrane, a national correspondent in Nashville, has reported on the police beating of Tyre Nichols and how it has affected Memphis.
Dec. 5, 2024Updated 3:05 p.m. ET
Officials in Memphis reiterated on Thursday that the city would not immediately agree to negotiate an overhaul of the Memphis Police Department with the federal government, with Mayor Paul Young warning that doing so could be “bureaucratic and costly.”
Mr. Young’s comments came a day after the Justice Department released the findings of a 17-month-long investigation into the department, including that its officers unlawfully used excessive force, disproportionately targeted Black people and mistreated children and those with mental health issues.
Both Mr. Young and Cerelyn Davis, the city’s interim police chief, declined to weigh in on the details of the 73-page report, saying they were still absorbing it. But in pushing back against the Justice Department’s request to negotiate a legally binding improvement plan, or consent decree, Mr. Young pointed to changes that the police department already introduced after several of its officers fatally beat Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, last year.
Those changes and others still to come, he said, would constitute “an effective improvement plan that transcends what is undoubtedly a bureaucratic and costly consent decree.”
Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights and who oversaw the investigation, said that the Justice Department could sue Memphis given the scope of the constitutional violations that its investigation found. But time constraints would most likely make that challenging: President Biden has less than two months left in office, and the incoming Trump administration may not want to see the case through.
The unusual resistance to negotiating a consent decree, which would allow for federal oversight of the police department, comes as the Justice Department is scrambling to finish at least six investigations into police conduct before President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in January.
