Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday his Justice Department will “pull back” on suing police departments over civil rights violations.
“We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness. And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that. So we’re going to try to pull back on this,” the former Alabama senator and federal prosecutor told a meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in Washington, D.C.
The decision, Sessions said, is not “wrong or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.” He instead explained that the federal government must be working to collaborate better with police departments to combat violent crime in poor and minority communities.
Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department opened 24 investigations into police departments. It enforced 19 agreements with departments at the end of 2016.
Sessions’ comments come a day after he seemed to dismiss the DOJ’s reports on those civil rights lawsuits with police departments from cities like Ferguson, Mo., and Chicago.
“I have not read those reports, frankly. We’ve had summaries of them, and some of it was pretty anecdotal, and not so scientifically based,” Sessions told reporters Monday.
