Police Consent Decrees and Section 1983 Civil Rights Litigation

Abstract

Research SummarySection 14141 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 granted the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) the authority to investigate, intervene into, and force reforms within any police department deemed to exhibit a pattern or practice of police misconduct. The DOJ's primary enforcement mechanism is to sue the offending jurisdiction. Such lawsuits are typically settled with “consent decrees” or court‐ordered legal agreements to implement specified reforms. We assembled a panel data set to explore the relationship between consent decrees and civil rights litigation in 23 targeted jurisdictions. The results suggest that DOJ intervention may be associated with modest reductions in the risk of civil rights filings.Policy ImplicationsFederal consent decrees are pursued under the assumption that they reduce civil rights violations, yet this assumption has remained largely untested. Such oversight is unfortunate, as it is important to gauge the effectiveness of time‐consuming and expensive federal intervention into local law enforcement affairs. Our study offers preliminary evidence that consent decrees may reduce civil rights violations, as operationalized by Section 1983 litigation, an indicator of police misconduct. Reductions in such filings may signal increased satisfaction with police agencies and a move toward reduced systemic police misconduct. As such, consent decrees should continue to be considered as a possible tool for correcting problematic police departments, but additional research in this area is critical.