It’s the same as it has always been. Some cops do something horrible, the DOJ steps in, the DOJ finds plenty of things wrong with the place housing the cops, the DOJ imposes its will on the cop shop… and years later, no one can really tell that anything happened.
Even less will happen now with Donald Trump returning to office. Trump pretty much shuttered the DOJ’s Civil Rights division during his first four years as president. There’s little reason to believe he won’t do the same thing upon his return.
The DOJ — as it stands now — is wrapping up as many investigations as it can. But it likely will never get the chance to hand down consent decrees meant to reform abusive law enforcement agencies. Perhaps the most we’ll earn from this is a bit more knowledge. A bit more documentation. Like every single other investigation of a law enforcement agency, this investigation of the Mt. Vernon (NY) police department has uncovered widespread, repeated civil rights abuses.
Here’s the headliner:
Until at least the fall of 2022, it was the Mount Vernon force’s practice to strip search every person it arrested, according to the report. Officers also strip-searched people they did not arrest, detained and interrogated people without formally arresting them, and arrested people for verbally criticizing police officers.
Illegal strip and cavity searches continued until at least 2023, the report found.
You can’t just strip search everyone you arrest or detain. You can (sometimes) do this during the booking process if you have reason to believe they might have stashed contraband somewhere inside themselves, but you really can’t do this (in almost every case) to people who haven’t even been arrested.
And what brought… well, not the end of it, but at least a brief slowdown to this pattern and practice of illegal strip searches? It was the arrival of the DOJ to open an investigation. And even the presence of DOJ investigators wasn’t enough to actually force the Mt. Vernon PD to stop doing it altogether.
The investigators said that while the practice was “curtailed” during its probe, “we are not confident that these practices have ended.”
The report [PDF] makes it clear it’s not going to get any better in Mt. Vernon any time soon, even if Trump decides the DOJ should still perform the important work of at least attempting to instill accountability in law enforcement agencies around the nation.
Even if it can move forward with a consent decree, the DOJ seems doubtful any efforts it makes will result in permanent improvements.
MVPD’s practices are directly attributable to significant systemic deficiencies in MVPD’s policies, training, supervision, and accountability systems, all of which are rooted in a long history of municipal dysfunction. Municipal financial mismanagement has seriously eroded MVPD’s ability to follow basic practices standard in modern policing, such as keeping its 911 system up and running, providing its officers with Taser cartridges so they have a less-lethal force option, and ensuring that officers who interact with the public are equipped with body-worn cameras.
Leadership failures have resulted in the absence of needed policies or ones that have not been updated in decades; a complete lack of training on critical topics; and ineffective supervision, including supervisors investigating incidents in which they were personally involved. MVPD’s data collection and records management are also deeply deficient. MVPD keeps no records of stops unless they result in arrests, for example, and despite our standing requests from early in the investigation for all misconduct files, MVPD continued to discover new files up until a few months ago. Put simply, MVPD does not have much of the basic infrastructure necessary to provide Constitutional and effective policing in the 21st century.
TL;DR: it’s fucked from top to bottom. Even if the DOJ can get the court and city to agree to reforms, the city doesn’t have the funds to attract the talent needed to keep them in place and the PD doesn’t have the pull to keep officers from going literally anywhere else, either because the money’s better or the oversight is more lax.
What little tax dollars can be generated by a small New York suburb the DOJ says “has significant poverty” will continue to be wasted by a law enforcement agency residents don’t trust and a city government that has proven repeatedly powerless (or disinterested) to institute reforms on its own.
This is as depressing as it gets. Even if everyone involved truly wants systemic change, there’s no money to do it and no one with the willpower to make it happen. This hopelessness is obvious from the DOJ’s narrative, which points out cops couldn’t even be bothered to stop violating rights despite being in the midst of a federal investigation.
Even so, the DOJ can’t simply walk away from this. (It can, however, be ordered away from this if the incoming president decides this isn’t the sort of thing his DOJ is going to be doing.) The effort is still worth making, even if it seems doomed to fail. The facts have been made public. The problems have been identified. If nothing else, it will help plaintiffs in lawsuits against Mt. Vernon officers, even if hopes of a settlement might be tempered by the city’s apparent inability to write checks that won’t bounce. Unfortunately, the few cops willing to take lower pay in exchange for less oversight will continue to remain employed without outside intervention. Let’s hope this cleans a little bit of Mt. Vernon’s house before the DOJ moves on, or is told to move out.
