Veterans of former President Barack Obama’s task force on policing say they made progress on the issues involved in George Floyd’s death in custody, which has triggered unrest throughout the country, but President Trump dropped the baton.
Following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Obama took executive action in 2014 to create a task force that could agree on how to police cities and towns fairly. The 11 members of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing came from law enforcement, academia, and civil rights organizations. In the course of two months, they came up with 59 steps to improve how law enforcement policies affect the public, especially minorities.
Task force co-chair Laurie Robinson told the Washington Examiner one of the problems with the group’s final report was that it was up to each law enforcement department whether or not to follow its tips.
“At the policing meetings I attended, the big conferences, it would be hard to find a police chief in the country who’s not aware of these recommendations and familiar with them and, in many cases, has adopted many of them in their department,” said Robinson, the Clarence J. Robinson professor of criminology, law, and society at George Mason University in Virginia and former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs.
A DOJ office called Community Oriented Policing Services served as the middleman between the government and local police agencies who wanted to implement the report’s dozens of recommendations over the next two years left in the Obama administration. The Obama administration also worked with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, National Sheriffs Association, and other law enforcement groups to roll out the recommendations.
But the new administration has not continued that progress, according to Tracey L. Meares, a fellow member of Obama’s task force.
“The report is just over five years old, and departments across the country were taking the recommendations seriously and beginning to implement them,” said Meares, the Walton Hale Hamilton professor and faculty director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School in Connecticut. “Here are thousands of departments across the country, and wholesale culture change without federal leadership is unlikely to occur with speed. We have made small gains, but there is still a great deal of work to do.”
In that time, America has seen countless police-involved shootings of unarmed black men and women, reaching a climax last week after Floyd was killed by a white officer in Minneapolis.
“Some departments embrace [recommendations]. Some do not,” said Michael Lawlor, former Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning, and now criminal justice professor at the University of New Haven. “I think you’re seeing the more serious problems occurring in the departments that did not appear to embrace these things.”
Jonathan F. Thompson, executive director for the National Sheriffs Association, said sheriffs, who are elected to office, unlike police chiefs, need to have “very hard discussions” with community members.
“The problems have to be solved by sheriffs and police. Where they are succeeding, we’re seeing calm restored,” said Thompson. “There’s not a right way or a wrong way when it comes to the local level, other than the people say, ‘We don’t want to be policed this way. We do want to be policed this way.’ It’s a fundamental [shift in the] way of looking at how they do their jobs.”
Lawlor pointed to East Haven, Connecticut, where he described a police department that was “off the rails” and saw officers arrested for racial profiling against Latinos years ago. The Justice Department intervened with court-ordered policy changes.
“Fast-forward to present, it’s a completely different operation … but it took a federal court order to force the local police department to adopt many of the recommendations,” said Lawlor. “The [Obama task force’s] recommendations are just as valid today as they were then, it’s just that I think people appreciate the need to do it now.”
In January, Trump signed an executive order creating a commission to study a broader set of police issues. The commission was called for by the Obama task force and will release its report later this year.
“What we need to do is — what steps need to be taken to implement those recommendations? It’s great to have recommendations, but not just put on the shelf, or we will be reliving this episode over and over,” said Robinson.
