Fort Worth police will not change without federal court intervention, clergy says
Police in Fort Worth need outside help and should look it in the form of a federally court ordered consent decree, the Rev. Kyev Tatum said Thursday.
A police monitor and a community oversight board will not be enough to reverse the years of distrust and broken promises between the police department and the residents in this community, Tatum said.
The federal courts must be involved, he said.
“The Coleman report wasn’t enough, the 3-E plan wasn’t enough, the Race and Culture Task Force wasn’t enough,” Tatum said. “We need outside intervention. They [Fort Worth city officials] are not adhering to the Coleman report, the 3-E agreement. They continually ignore what we had agreed upon.“
The consent decree meeting, which took place Thursday night at the New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church, where Tatum is pastor, was partly in response to the number of recent police shootings in the city, Tatum said.
A consent decree is a negotiated agreement entered as a court order that is enforceable by a judge, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The calls for a federal consent decree come less than a month after the police shooting of JaQuavion Slaton, an armed 20-year-old found hiding in a pickup truck who was wanted by police in Tyler.
Councilwoman Gyna Bivens also addressed the crowd, saying that she tells everyone, including the police, that she just wants to see everyone get home.
“This is the most effective and efficient way to begin the healing in Fort Worth,” Bivens said.
But Dexter Wimbish, a judge and former national counsel for the Southern Christian Leadership Counsel, promoted another idea that also seemed to gain favor with the crowd, and with Tatum.
“Perhaps we should bring a lawsuit against the city of Fort Worth for reparations,” Wimbish suggested. ”The only question is how much money do they owe us.”
The harm Fort Worth has done to its African-American population is documented in the city’s own reports, Tatum said. Some others in the audience suggested that perhaps the best path forward might to pursue both alternatives.
Coleman and Associates were hired by the city to investigate complaints by police officers and residents that they had been discriminated against by the city. The Coleman report concluded there was evidence of discrimination in the police department.
The 3-E Action Plan was created to improve relationships between residents and the police department, but the plan’s authors told city officials that they were disappointed with the slow response and felt more transparency was needed.
City officials agreed to implement recommendations from the Race and Culture Task Force that addressed the relationship between police and residents, and police behavior.
“I do not trust Fort Worth,” Tatum said. “Everything they tell us, it might be good for a minute, but then they change the rules of the game. We need someone from outside.”
Police transparency and police restraint, particularly when incidents involving people of color occur, continue to be problems, Tatum said.
“We’re going to press as many ways as we can,” Tatum said. “There is a huge void of trust between the black community and the police now. People are afraid to get pulled over, afraid for their children.”
What is a consent decree and how does it work?
Federal agencies have employed consent decrees to overhaul troubled local police departments. Several police departments, such as Ferguson, Mo., New Orleans and Baltimore, were placed under consent decrees during the Obama administration. But that activity slowed after President Donald Trump’s appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general.
Sessions, who was critical of consent decrees, distributed a memo shortly before leaving office limiting their use by the U.S. Department of Justice, which often instigated consent degree settlement negotiations or filed lawsuits to encourage cities to negotiate.
The Chicago Police Department went under a court-ordered consent decree this year after the city was sued by the then Illinois Attorney General, Lisa Madigan.
These court-monitored agreements can last more than a decade, can cost millions of dollars and can sometimes be helpful in reforming police department culture, said Alex Del Carmen, executive director of Tarleton State University’s criminology school and a former federal monitor of police departments under consent decrees.
A consent decree can cost much less than a string of jury rulings against a police department can cost, Del Carmen said.
Most police departments do not qualify to be under a consent decree, Del Carmen said. Having problems from time to time does not qualify a police department for the type of intense monitoring a consent decree employs, he said.
“But when the culture of a department is not influenced by national organizations like PERF, the Police Executive Research Forum, or the National Association of Chiefs of Police, when they reject international standards of policing, and forget that they need to be responsive to the community, and they inadequately investigate use of force incidents and officers, then the city has to look outside as a way to begin to influence positive behaviors,” Del Carmen said.
Cities have different levels of tolerance, Del Carmen said. In Ferguson, where there was the high-profile shooting of an unarmed African-American man, and violence followed, a consent decree was ushered in quickly, he said.
A lot has to do with how much people in that community trust the police, Del Carmen said.
“In some cities, one bad shooting is enough,” he said. “In other cities, it takes 10 years for people to speak up.”
This story was originally published June 27, 2019 at 10:09 PM with the headline "Fort Worth police will not change without federal court intervention, clergy says."