CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 has served as the basis for the reform of many police departments in cities across the country, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. And in what's now seen as an increasingly likely next step, Ferguson, Missouri, will undergo its own Department of Justice-administered police reforms.
Despite some shortcomings, structural police reform litigation has been an effective tool for reducing misconduct in several law enforcement agencies, according to a forthcoming study by a University of Illinois expert in criminal law.
Structural reform litigation is uniquely effective at combating misconduct in police departments, says Stephen Rushin, a professor of law at Illinois.
"It forces local municipalities to prioritize investments in police misconduct regulations," he said. "It utilizes external monitoring to ensure that frontline officers substantively comply with top-down mandates, and it provides police executives with legal cover to implement wide-ranging, potentially unpopular reforms aimed at curbing misconduct."
The paper, which will be published next month in the Minnesota Law Review, draws on original interviews, court documents, statistical data and media reports to describe the federal government's use of structural reform litigation and theorize on its effectiveness.
"Structural reform litigation provides the federal government with a unique opportunity to force local police agencies to adopt invasive and costly reforms," Rushin said. "Because of this, legal scholars have long been optimistic that it could become one of the most important ways of addressing police misconduct."
The paper outlines the structural litigation reform process - where it's happened in the past, how long it took, how much it cost and, ultimately, how effective it was. It also details the package of reforms that are most commonly implemented by municipalities: use of force policy changes, early intervention and risk management systems, complaint procedures and investigations, and training overhaul.
"Most agreements have included sections regulating the use of force by police officers, and virtually all agreements require some change in officer training and the implementation of an early warning system to identify officers engaged in a pattern of misconduct," Rushin said. "Agreements also frequently regulate the handling of citizen complaints and the internal investigation of officer wrongdoing. About half of the agreements require external auditing or monitoring to ensure compliance.
"In recent years, the scope has expanded to cover a wide range of topics, including gender bias, interrogations, lineup procedures, recruitment, crisis intervention and promotion standards."
Although police departments in some of the nation's largest cities have undergone structural police reform, there has been little empirical research on the topic, Rushin said.
"Previous studies offer little explanation of how and why structural reform litigation achieved its results," he said. "This is in part because the existing literature offers a relatively thin conception of how the process works from beginning to end. My paper attempts to fill this gap by developing a thorough descriptive account of this largely extra-judicial police-reform process."
The paper also details some of the weaknesses of structural reform litigation.
"It's far from a perfect regulatory mechanism," Rushin said. "The process is long and costly, and questions remain about the sustainability of its reforms after monitoring ends. Some also question whether this type of federal intervention makes officers less aggressive. Successful organizational reform requires continual support from municipal leaders, dedication by executives within the targeted agency, and buy-in by frontline officers. Taken together, it all suggests that structural reform litigation alone is insufficient to transform a law enforcement agency."
The financial burden of structural reform litigation is heavy, and falls on local police agencies over a relatively short period of time.
"It is costly, but structural reform litigation may ultimately pay for itself by reducing a police department's civil liability," Rushin said.
According to Rushin, the Ferguson case is progressing similarly to many other past structural reform cases.
"While each negotiated settlement should be specifically tailored to the unique needs of the individual municipality, they've proven to be remarkably similar over time," he said. "What we're seeing so far in Ferguson is no exception, and it's what you would expect to see in a case like this: a change in leadership, the DOJ getting ready to propose a significant package of reforms, and the city about to undergo a potentially decade-long reform process."
Rushin cautions that there are no fast-track solutions to police reform - in Ferguson or anywhere else in the U.S.
"It's slow and incremental by design so you can change leadership and bring about sustainable reform over time," he said. "Ferguson could take less time because it's not a department with thousands of officers, but I would imagine some pretty significant reforms will be implemented."
But will the process bring about sustainable reform?
"It's worked pretty well in a lot of different cities, but the question of whether this will work long-term in Ferguson is still an open one," Rushin said "In some cities, the reforms have been maintained long-term. In others, it hasn't. But it looks like a good tool for this particular situation."