WASHINGTON — In Chicago, the investigators in 2017 said police officers shot at moving vehicles with no justification, and endangered young people by bringing them to rival gang territory and leaving them there.
In Seattle, they wrote in 2011, two police officers tasered and beat a mentally ill man in the middle of a crisis, leaving him with a brain injury.
And in Baltimore, where the investigators in 2016 found a full 91 percent of people arrested for trespassing or failure to obey were Black, they said officers punched and pepper-sprayed a juvenile after they accused him and his sister of loitering; they were standing in front of their own home.
In each case the investigators involved were from the US Department of Justice, and in all three cities they determined the local police department had systematically deprived citizens of their constitutional rights — findings that set the stage for those cities to enter into court-enforced reform plans, known as consent decrees.
For 20 years, investigations like those, and the consent decrees that followed, were key to federal efforts to bring more accountability to policing in the United States, especially during the Obama administration. But as the nation reckons again with racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is all but out of the business of systemic police reform.
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