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Three years after police killed George Floyd, the Justice Department released an 89-page report on Minneapolis police’s pattern of anti-Black discrimination, ableism, deadly force, and other federal civil rights violations.
What’s coming is a consent decree, a court order enforcing a reform plan. But will that work?
Other cities that became sites of high-profile police killings, like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Chicago, have had consent decrees for years. But we still need more data to answer that question fully.
However, what we already know is that consent decrees allocate more resources to cops, from training to mental health services.
As abolitionist Derecka Purnell noted in Ferguson’s case, this allocation happened while brutality victims received nothing. And after four years in Chicago, the CPD was only fully compliant with 5% of their decree’s 552 sections.
The system’s designed to brutalize us. So, consent decree or not, police are simply continuing to fit their job descriptions.
These decrees tell us individual police departments are violent, then ask, “How can we make them better?” But let’s reframe that question, and that solution.
How can we end police violence and improve living conditions for those harmed by police?
Consent decrees decide that justice and accountability mean police deserve more technology, time, and money. But we can and should redefine that. We deserve better.