The federal office that is reviewing the St. Anthony Police Department in the wake of the Philando Castile fatal police shooting announced Friday that it would roll back the very program being used for the review — which community observers now believe will never come.
On Friday, the Department of Justice announced that its Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS office, would make changes to its “Collaborative Reform Initiative,” which had been working with the St. Anthony department for many months.
The change was made “to better align the program with the principles outlined by the Attorney General in support of local law enforcement,” the DOJ said in a statement.
In March, newly appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo to his department heads ordering staff to review all DOJ programs to make sure they promoted “officer safety, officer morale, and public respect for their work,” and ensured public safety remained under “local control and local accountability.”
Sessions was quoted in Friday’s statement calling the change to the COPS program “a course correction to ensure that resources go to agencies that require assistance rather than expensive wide-ranging investigative assessments.”
Late last year — after St. Anthony officials made an unsolicited request to the feds — the COPS office announced that it would conduct a “collaborative reform” review of the city’s police. Since that announcement, the office held several listening sessions in St. Anthony, where citizens attended and voiced concerns. Those wrapped up in January, and the report was expected by community observers to be finished by October.
When asked how the revamp would affect the St. Anthony investigation, a Justice Department official replied in an email late Friday: “If St. Anthony chooses to continue this work, the COPS Office will transition the agreement into the new realigned Collaborative Reform process agreement and will work collaboratively with the law enforcement agency to fulfill its technical assistance needs.”
Those “technical assistance needs” include police training programs in a variety of subjects, from responding to active shooters to de-escalation to “response to mass demonstrations.”
Some background documentation provided by the DOJ stated that the COPS program had gone beyond its intended scope under the Obama administration and “led to the unintended consequence of a more adversarial relationship between DOJ and the participating law enforcement agencies.”
“Over the past several years, Collaborative Reform evolved to include much broader ranging assessments of law enforcement agencies, identifying criticisms of agency practices as a basis for the COPS Office to recommend significant changes.”
Kristine Lizdas, a member of St. Anthony Villagers for Community Action, which has been monitoring the DOJ review, isn’t optimistic about what the changes mean. Police watchdog groups said they believed the point of the review was to identify problems, provide accountability and build trust, rather than just offer open-ended training without direction.
Offering police training for “response to mass demonstrations,” instead of reviewing polices that may have contributed to the reasons for those demonstrations, earned an outright guffaw.
“I had just been hopeful … that we would see a report out of St. Anthony before the program was killed,” Lizdas said. “I think it would be an extraordinary act by staff to try to get out those reports at this juncture.”
She added that killing the report equated to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours lost.
“The COPS office is sitting on a tremendous amount of information, and it’s heartbreaking to think of the thousands of hours that went in,” she said. “It’s devastating when you think of the amount of time COPS staff, and their contract technical assistance providers, spent in St. Anthony alone.”
A person who answered the phone at the St. Anthony Police Department said, “We’re not happy about it,” and said the department would be releasing a statement about the federal announcement later Friday. A call to St. Anthony Mayor Jerry Faust was not immediately returned Friday evening.
While the release said the change would still allow COPS to “provide targeted assistance directly to local law enforcement based on their identified needs and requests,” nationwide, such reviews — like St. Anthony’s — were entered into voluntarily, and often at the request of the cities involved. Unlike the DOJ’s more serious “pattern or practice” investigations, the results of such reviews were nonbinding.
While some civil liberty advocates expected Sessions to leave the program alone, others were skeptical. Since Sessions took over the DOJ, the department has not released any collaborative review reports.
“There are reports that were expected to be released that have not yet been produced. There’s a report around Milwaukee that was expected for some time,” Kanya Bennett, legislative council for the ACLU’s National office, said in June.
The DOJ’s announcement said changes to the program would go into effect immediately.
During his confirmation hearing, Sessions voiced concern that the DOJ’s more serious “consent decrees” — which are monitored by a federal judge — could “undermine the respect for police” and affect department morale.
“I think there is concern that good police officers and good departments can be sued by the Department of Justice when you just have individuals within a department that have done wrong,” Sessions said, according to the Baltimore Sun. “These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness, and we need to be careful before we do that.”
The next month, during his first major speech as attorney general, Sessions said he would pull back on federal civil rights investigations of police departments, adding that he worried such probes “diminished their (police departments) effectiveness.”
Castile was shot by St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez in July 2016 during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights. Yanez was acquitted of manslaughter charges in June. He no longer works for the police department.
Josh Verges contributed to this report.