The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent

A National Lawyers Guild Report 15
of Justice entered into in 1999 amid allegations that police were
engaging in racial profiling. A U.S. District Judge signed an order in
early April 2004 ending federal oversight of the Office of
Professional Standards, the internal affairs unit of the New Jersey
police. Civil-rights leaders were critical of the judge’s decision,
saying that the consent decree should not be lifted in pieces.
Mr. Ashcroft publicly indicated his reluctance to use the law to
prosecute police departments in his remarks to the Fraternal Order of
Police in its 55th Biennial National Conference in Phoenix on
August 14, 2001. In explaining how in 1999 the District of Columbia
Metropolitan Police Department “asked for help to determine if its
officers used excessive force in dealing with members of the public,”
he described how the Justice Department began to “fix the problem:”
No court orders were involved. No consent decrees
were issued. Through hard work and good will on
both sides we were able to produce results. 24
Consent decrees are generally regarded as critical in implementing
institutional reform in police departments. Former U.S. Assistant
Attorney General John Dunne has noted that consent decrees force
top-level police officials to commit to reform. 25 He also supports
bringing pattern-and-practice suits and says they cast “a whole new
light on the matter of Civil Rights Division responsibility.” 26 Indeed,
Mr. Ashcroft’s “hard work and good will” approach clearly had no
long-term effect on the MPD’s pattern and practice of using
excessive force against members of the public, as a 2004 report by
the D.C. City Council’s Committee on the Judiciary explains in
detail. 27
By not exercising federal prosecutorial oversight of national,
systemic police violations of civil rights, Attorney General Ashcroft
is essentially acting as a conspirator with police departments around
the nation to deprive people of their constitutionally protected rights.
Ashcroft could, for example, bring pattern-and-practice suits under
the Federal Civil Rights Act, 42 USC Sections 1981-1988, especially
Section 1983 (the Civil Rights Act of 1871). <strong>The</strong> Supreme Court
identified the three primary purposes intended by the Congress that
enacted the statute: 1) to override certain kinds of state laws; 2) to
provide a remedy where state law was inadequate; and 3) to provide
a federal remedy where the state remedy, though adequate in theory,
was not available in practice. 28