MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to begin with the Biden administration's final push to address what it sees as abuse of police practices, concluding in the city where George Floyd was murdered. The Minneapolis City Council just voted to approve an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department called a consent decree. It's a legal agreement to change certain practices, in Minneapolis set into motion by the police killing of George Floyd in the spring of 2020. The agreement calls for changes in training, controls on the use of force in some situations and an obligation to track and investigate complaints of misconduct. This is the second consent decree reached under the Biden administration, which is also enforcing more than a dozen others reached under previous administrations. Now the question becomes how effective these have been, and how effective they may be under the new Trump administration.
We're going to ask Kristen Clarke. She's the assistant attorney general who leads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us.
KRISTEN CLARKE: Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: I'd like to get your response to something that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said earlier this week. He pointed to what he called one of the most important pieces of this consent decree.
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JACOB FREY: Ensuring that supervision itself is consistent, and so that officers are reporting up through a chain of command that is consistent and the direction that is given is clear.
MARTIN: You know, this speaks to this classic issue that we've seen in stories like this. There's what's taught in the academy. There's what the policy is, and then there's what really happens on the street. So how does this actually get enforced?
CLARKE: You know, this work is about improving a police department's ability to police itself. It's about strengthening accountability. It's about responding swiftly and quickly when officers violate policy and protocol. We step in where we identify breaks in the system. Our consent decrees help police departments that want to do better - that want to make sure that they are instituting best practices and, you know, really maintaining 21st-century standards when it comes to running its police department.
MARTIN: As we mentioned, the administration has negotiated this agreement and another and is enforcing 15 more. What evidence do you have that these agreements have actually made an impact - both in curtailing the kinds of incidents that have caused so much grief in so many places, but also in creating the confidence that the police are actually going to protect people and not hurt them? I mean, do you have that evidence?
CLARKE: You know, the department's been doing this work for 30 years and has an extraordinary track record of success. So recent examples come from places like Seattle, where the department has reduced the use of force by 60%; Baltimore, where they use force less often; Albuquerque, where violations of the use of force policy fell by more than 50%, and I could go on. But in places where we have partnered and collaborated with law enforcement agencies, we're seeing improvements while we also see reductions in crime.
MARTIN: Well, I was going to speak to that because Donald Trump, as the incoming president, was critical of consent decrees in his previous presidential term. His view of policing seems to be that the police may actually be too constrained, and there are people in law enforcement who agree with him. I mean, there are people who argue that some of the spikes in violent crime that we've seen in some places since 2020 - some of those spikes are curtailing now, but some people argue that that's because the police have been too constrained. What do you say to that?
CLARKE: Yeah, the data shows otherwise. You know, Newark, for example - their stops comply with constitutional standards, and crime is down 40% since we launched our decree. You know, a consent decree really is just a mutually agreed-upon roadmap for reform. It helps us to avoid contested litigation. And it just means that we are working swiftly and putting all of our attention and effort into reform that really helps to improve public safety and ensure that we are respecting people's civil and constitutional rights.
MARTIN: Well, given that the income administration has such a different view of what constitutes - at least seems to have such a different view of what constitutes abuse of policing practices, what happens now?
CLARKE: You know, Tyre Nichols, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd - these are reminders about why this work is so urgent and why we need to continue to prioritize this work in the road ahead. A lot of these cities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars paying out on wrongful death lawsuits and the like. It's time we focus our energies and efforts on making sure that police departments are really respecting the Constitution and people's civil rights.
MARTIN: That is Kristen Clarke. She is the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. Assistant Attorney General, thank you so much for speaking with us.
CLARKE: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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