Biden and Harris push scrutiny of the police. Trump would halt such efforts.

Donald Trump is vowing to end the Biden administration’s wide-reaching efforts to curb abusive policing, promising if he returns to the White House to rein in federal oversight of local law enforcement and empower officers to aggressively “clean up” American cities.

Among the changes Trump has promoted: allowing the use of stop-and-frisk to interrogate suspects, rescinding a Biden administration ban on the transfer of military equipment to local police departments, deputizing local officers to enforce immigration laws, and deploying the National Guard to fight crime.

“The Democrat party has a war on with police,” Trump said at a campaign rally last month in Charlotte. “We will give our police back their power, protection, respect that they deserve.”

On the campaign trail and in meetings with supporters, Trump has signaled his intent to curb federal monitoring of local police and to withhold funds from departments unwilling to employ more confrontational tactics, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“I think we will see a full-on gutting of the (Justice Department’s) efforts to hold law enforcement accountable for misconduct,” said Chiraag Bains, who served on President Joe Biden’s White House Domestic Policy Council.

Trump allies say he would act in a second term to correct what they see as ideological overreach by the Biden and Obama administrations. The Justice Department should be “surgical” in addressing specific police misconduct rather than pursuing legally binding consent decrees that mandate wide changes, said Jason C. Johnson, a former deputy police commissioner in Baltimore who is president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.

Under Biden, the Justice Department’s civil rights division has opened broad investigations into 11 local police departments and provided technical assistance and training to hundreds more. In response to mass social justice protests in 2020, the government imposed use-of-force restrictions on federal officers and began implementing dozens of provisions from a presidential executive order on police accountability.

Trump has cited such efforts to cast Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as weak on violent crime - even though homicide and assault rates have dropped to pre-pandemic levels after spiking in 2021 and 2022. At rallies, Trump’s supporters often wear black-and-blue T-shirts and wave the “thin blue line” flag in solidarity with law enforcement.

Biden’s defenders point out that as president he has boosted federal funding for law enforcement, rejecting calls from liberal activists to defund the police. They lambaste Trump for denouncing federal law enforcement agencies and promising to pardon Jan. 6 protesters convicted of injuring police officers.

Harris is highlighting her years as a prosecutor in California, while Trump has tried to tie her to the 2020 protests, sometimes with unfair and racially charged attacks. As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris called for shifting some funding from policing to education and social programs, saying the criminal justice system had disproportionately targeted minorities and poor people.

Harris aides declined to comment on her policing proposals if she becomes president, and the Trump campaign did not respond to questions for this article.

In early July at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and private club, the former president met with leaders of the National Fraternal Order of Police and reiterated his intent to turn officers loose to fight crime, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting. He also vowed to shield officers from civil liability.

Trump disparaged reform-minded local prosecutors in two major U.S. cities, one person said, accusing them of failing to bring enough cases and vowing to appoint federal prosecutors who would more aggressively target violent crime.

Backing off the police

As special counsel for the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Obama administration, Emily Gunston led a 13-month probe into alleged abuses within the Chicago Police Department. The administration had ramped up such “pattern or practice” investigations in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a Black man, in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

Her team’s report concluded that Chicago’s police department regularly used unlawful force, including shooting at fleeing suspects and using Tasers in nonviolent encounters. A week before Trump took office, the city and the Justice Department arrived at an agreement in principle, pledging to negotiate reforms.

After Trump was sworn in, however, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ended that work, calling the Justice Department’s findings “pretty anecdotal and not so scientifically based,” while acknowledging he’d read only a summary of the report. Justice officials unsuccessfully sought to block then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) from entering into a state consent agreement with the Illinois attorney general.

Sessions later effectively banned federal prosecutors from using consent decrees in policing or other investigations, saying their “wide-ranging and long-term obligations” improperly overrode local control.

Gunston, who left the Justice Department in 2018, said she considered Sessions’s move “a complete abdication of our responsibility.”

The Obama administration entered into 15 consent decrees with local police departments. Under Trump, federal authorities launched a single police investigation, in Springfield, Mass., which led to a consent decree a little over a year after Biden took office. The Trump administration also halted the Obama-era Collaborative Reform Initiative, which sought voluntary training partnerships with local police.

State attorneys general and civil rights groups sought to fill the void, pursuing their own civil lawsuits against police departments. Those patchwork efforts found little support in Republican-leaning jurisdictions and made halting progress in Democratic ones.

In Chicago, for example, the police department has met just 6% of the requirements under the 2019 state consent order, according to an independent monitor’s report.

Leaving local prosecutors exclusively in charge of reform efforts is risky, said Jonathan Smith, a former Justice official who consulted on Chicago’s state consent decree negotiations. State laws rarely address civil rights as comprehensively as federal statutes, he said, and elected prosecutors can be reluctant to crack down on police - in part because of what Smith called a mistaken perception that such efforts can trigger a rise in crime.

“There’s been this panic created that crime did go off because we went too far in trying to make police act in a constitutional fashion. There’s no evidence for that,” Smith said. “In fact, there’s some evidence that reform increases the ability to solve crime because you’ve got greater trust and confidence in the community.”

In June 2020, after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd sparked mass protests, Trump directed federal authorities to leverage federal grant money to encourage police to adopt de-escalation techniques. Democrats panned the order as falling far short of the sweeping changes that advocates were demanding.

A return to federal oversight

Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, rescinded the ban on consent decrees in early 2021. A year later, the president directed the Justice Department to develop national standards for the accreditation of police departments and a database of federal officers with disciplinary records.

In the last three years, federal investigators have issued scathing reports detailing systemic abuse and misconduct by police departments in Minneapolis, Louisville and Phoenix.

And prosecutors won federal criminal convictions against the four Minneapolis officers involved in Floyd’s death. They are pursuing civil right cases against officers in Louisville, Memphis and elsewhere.

Harris joined Biden in championing these actions. In December, she hailed the president’s executive order on police accountability and renewed calls on Congress to pass policing legislation she had co-authored in the Senate.

“President Biden and I will continue to do all we can to advance police accountability and strengthen the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve,” Harris said.

Civil rights activists remain frustrated at the pace of police accountability efforts, noting that fatal police shootings are on the rise and that the Justice Department has completed just three of its 11 investigations into police agencies.

Chanelle Helm, a Black Lives Matter organizer in Louisville who led protests after the police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020, said she has no confidence in the federal government’s ability to bring accountability.

“It’s really a sense of collective cognitive dissonance to continually ask this entity, which changes with administration, to address what it wants to address,” she said of the Justice Department. “Regardless of who is controlling the White House, there is always going to be some bias in our systems.”

Biden administration officials emphasized that changing the culture of abusive police departments takes years of sustained effort.

Trump’s campaign has attacked Harris for her past solidarity with the social justice movement, including a social media post in 2020 urging supporters to donate to a cash bail fund that helped some protesters who were arrested in Minneapolis.

In 2019, Harris proposed a federal police shooting review board, national standards for when police should use force and a doubling of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. After joining Biden’s ticket, she backed him in boosting federal money for policing.

Since replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee, Harris has pointed to her early career as a prosecutor to draw a contrast with Trump, who was convicted in May on 34 felony counts in a New York hush money case.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said in her first public appearance after Biden dropped out. “So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

The line became a staple of her stump speech, drawing huge applause.

What Trump is promising

Trump has garnered support from many police groups, in part by promising to strengthen qualified immunity to shield officers from civil liability for their actions.

“We’re going to indemnify our police so when they do the job they won’t lose their pension, their family, their life,” he said at a May fundraiser in Texas, according to donors who were there.

He has detailed plans on his campaign website to direct the Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate “radical, Marxist” state prosecutors whom Republicans accuse of failing to bring nonviolent drug cases or other low-level charges that have disproportionately been prosecuted against racial minorities.

Federal authorities have rarely investigated local prosecutors, and legal experts said doing so would be challenging, given how much discretion those prosecutors wield in decisions on charging.

Christy Lopez, a former Justice official, said redirecting the focus of the civil rights division away from police accountability, at a time when Trump is encouraging the use of stop-and-frisk and stricter immigration enforcement, would set police on a combustible course.

“Those are dangerous sentiments to be infusing in police departments,” she said. “And that’s precisely when you need civil rights protections the most.”

Uncertain over the future of federal intervention, local police agencies are weighing their options.

Officials in Louisville said they are racing to lock in a federal consent decree that would make it difficult for the Trump administration to change course.

In Seattle, where police have been under a consent order since 2012, local authorities are doing all they can to achieve full compliance, said Brian Maxey, the police department’s chief operating officer.

If Seattle were to be released from federal oversight under Trump, Maxey said, that could fuel public skepticism of the endeavor and engender doubts that the police had truly met the requirements.

City leaders in Phoenix said they are willing to address some misconduct allegations documented in a federal report in June that found police officers had targeted minorities and violated the rights of homeless people.

But several Phoenix City Council members voiced strong opposition to federal oversight. That means the Justice Department could be forced to sue the city to impose a consent order - an unlikely scenario if Trump returns to the White House.

“I believe in local control,” council member Ann O’Brien said in an interview. “A consent decree is not the path forward.”

Civil rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson helped persuade the Justice Department to open an investigation into alleged abuses by the tiny police department in Lexington, Miss., after she was arrested while filming a police traffic stop last year.

Achieving meaningful accountability in the state without strong federal support would take far longer, she said.

“It’s going to take significant pressure from the people, from the voters,” Jefferson said. “It will take civil rights groups suing instead of the federal government. It will be a lot harder.”

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Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.